
Glass. 
Book 



2ma 



r. 



c 



OBSERVATIONS 



THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL STATE 



EUROPEAN PEOPLE 

IN 

1848 and 1849; 



BEING THE SECOND SERIES OF 



THE NOTES OF A TRAVELLER. 



BY 

SAMUEL 'LAING, ESQ. 

author of 

"a journal of a residence in Norway;" "a tour in Sweden;" 

and the first series of " notes of a traveller on the social and 

political state of france, prussia, etc." 



LONDON: 



PRINTED FOR 

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND 1/ 

PATERNOSTER-ROW. 
1850. 



London : ' 

Sfottiswoodes and Shaw, 

New-street-Square. 



PREFACE. 



Every generation naturally thinks the events of its 
c m fifty years A he most important that have occurred 
in history ; as a straw close to the eye will hide an 
oak in the distance. It is no delusion, however, to 
regard the events of the present half century — the 
changes and improvements in the material, intellec- 
tual, and social condition of the European people — 
as eminently important and influential on the future 
generations of civilised society. Some of those 
changes and improvements may be valued too highly; 
the results may not come up to our expectations; 
some may be premature, and the people not in a state 
to profit by them, and some may be changes withom, 
being improvements ; but still the present generation 
is entitled, above all which have preceded it, to con- 
sider its own times remarkably important, — and not 
merely from the great historical events and revolu- 
tions, the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, and govern- 
ments of every form, which have distinguished these 
fifty years, but on account of the new social arrange- 

A 2 



IV PREFACE. 

ments and influences, the new elements of society 
which have sprung up and are overspreading all civil- 
ised lands. Koyalty, aristocracy, church-power, and 
feudalism in legislation, or in administrative function, 
have lost root and are withering away on the Conti- 
nent ; and the communications and interchanges of 
ideas, tastes, and requirements between the people of 
different countries — one of the most important of the 
new elements in the social state of Europe — are now 
too frequent, intimate, and fully established, for one 
nation to remain far or permanently behind another 
in its social and political arrangements. All Europe 
is advancing towards one goal, — a higher social and 
political condition, one more suitable than that into 
which feudality had settled in the 1 8th century, to the 
more enlightened, more civilised, and in mind and 
means more independent people of the 19th : and every 
country is throwing off, either gradually or by con- 
vulsive effort, the slough of ignorance and misgovern- 
ment in which it had been enveloped for the preceding 
thousand years. This half century is the transition- 
period of society from a lower to a higher state. 

The traveller who has watched the rise and pro- 
gress of the struggle and process of social regeneration 
now going on in France and Germany, will observe 
some very important institutions and arrangements 
of a very equivocal character, which the rulers of 
those countries, whether democratic, liberal, or auto- 
cratic, have as if by common consent created or 
adopted from each other in the course of this half 
century, for the purpose of securing their own power, 
and of repressing the universal tendency to changes, 



PREFACE. V 

reforms, and improvements real or imaginary. 
France and Belgium under liberal or popularly con- 
stituted governments, Austria and Prussia under 
autocratic governments, have equally adopted the 
centralisation of all social action in the hands of the 
state, the superintendence and control of all individual 
action, the functionary system, the Conscription or 
Landwehr system, and the educational system under 
government management. It may well be doubted 
whether these social arrangements and institutions, 
and new powers assumed by the state, be really con- 
ducive to freedom, constitutional government, and the 
social, material, and moral well-being of the people ; 
or whether they are not of a retrograde rather than of 
a progressive tendency, oppressions, and restraints on 
individual free agency, not suited to the spirit and 
requirements of the age, fetters in reality imposed 
upon the Continental people in the name and guise of 
ornaments or of necessary appendages, and which will 
be shaken off ere long in some fearful struggle. 

It is proposed in this series of Notes of a Traveller 
to give the impressions and views of these new social 
elements which have from time to time occurred to 
the Author, in repeated visits to the Continent. The 
great diffusion of landed property through the social 
body in France and Germany, and its good and evil 
results and tendencies — the fall and extinction of 
aristocracy as a social power and support of monarchi- 
cal government — the erection of functionarism instead 
of aristocracy, to uphold the Continental thrones — 
the educational system of the Continental governments 
centralising all tuition of the people in the hands of 

A 3 



VI PREFACE, 

functionary-teachers appointed by a minister of public 
instruction, for the purpose of forming and moulding 
the public mind and opinion suitably to the views and 
interests of the rulers — the failure of this system, by 
its own machinery counteracting its object, and the 
philosophic functionary-professors inoculating all the 
teachers and the whole generation under their tuition 
with social and political principles and speculations 
directly opposed to those of their governments — the 
Conscription and Landwehr system, with its results 
of giving military power, military organisation, and a 
restless barbarous military spirit incompatible with 
peace and industry to the whole population of the 
Continent, instead of confining those elements of evil 
to a single class in the community, maintained and 
controlled by a constitutional government, — these are 
new social elements introduced within this half cen- 
tury, which must be very influential on the future 
condition of the European people. Their vast import- 
ance is unquestionable, although their results as yet 
are not fully developed. It would certainly be great 
presumption to attempt, in the mere notes and ob- 
servations of a traveller, to lay down opinions or specu- 
lations on the future effects upon civilised society of 
such new and mighty causes ; or to do more than in- 
dicate their existence, importance, and present aspects. 
They are subjects which belong to the philosophic 
historian or social economist of some future genera- 
tion. The Author of these Notes proposes merely to 
point out to other Travellers a few of those new and 
important social elements for their inquiry and con- 
sideration ; and to suggest to his readers matter for 



PREFACE. Vll 

reflection both on domestic and foreign subjects. In 
this less ambitious task of merely furnishing sugges- 
tions, hints, and materials for others to think over, 
the Author's own views and observations may be 
weak, crude, unconnected, or even inconsistent with 
each other, and yet not be altogether useless or wide 
of his object in presenting them. He has no favourite 
theory, or code of opinions on social or political eco- 
nomy, to support by concealing views or impressions 
adverse to them, or by seeking only what may support 
them. His aim will be accomplished if he succeed in 
directing the attention of others to those mighty in- 
fluences now coming into operation for great future 
good or evil, in the social state of the Continental 
people. 

The success of the first series of Notes of a Travel- 
ler proves that a work which has no claim to being 
entertaining, well written, or instructive, may, from 
the advanced state of the public mind in this country, 
be very favourably received, if it be suggestive. Our 
reading public desires to think for itself, not to be 
thought for ; and in matters of opinion, speculation, 
and theory prefers the raw materials to the made-up 
article. To furnish the raw material is the object of 
the following Notes. 



A 4 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. I. 

Notes on Effects of Steam-power on social Relations. On Novelty 
in foreign Countries. On Calais and Dover. Eustace de St. 
Pierre, Beau Brummel, Edward III. On Flanders, Cassel, the 
Flemish Dialect. Difference of social Structure where the un- 
latinized Teutonic Dialects prevail. Division of the Land into 
small Estates on the Sea-coasts and River-sides of Europe. 
Division of Land on the Continent. Tendency to its Aggrega- 
tion in Britain. New Elements in the social Structure abroad. 
Difference of the social Structure in England. Subjects for the 
Traveller's Consideration - Page 1 



CHAP. II. 

Notes on the Small-estate Occupancy of Land in Flanders as com- 
pared with the Large-estate and Large-farm Occupancy in 
Scotland. Husbandry in Flanders and Scotland compared. 
Stall-feeding and Saving of Manure in Flanders. Small-estate 
Husbandry compared with Large-farm Husbandry. Scotch 
Farming and Improvements. Their Effects on the Condition of 
the People of Scotland. Introduction of the Scotch System of 
Farming into Ireland. Theory and Results of the Scotch System 
of Farming examined. Small Peasant-proprietors and Peasant- 
tenants. Their Husbandry and social Condition compared. 
Economy of Labour, the Basis of Scotch Farming - - 18 



X CONTENTS. 

CHAP. III. 

Notes on the Theory of Population and Food increasing in different 
Ratios. The relative Increase of Population and Food stated 
differently. Land to produce Food artificially, not naturally, 
scarce for the Subsistence of its Population. Over-population 
only relative to Under-production from conventional Causes. 
On the Over-population of Ireland. On the Size of Farms in 
Ireland. On the Impracticability of converting the small Irish 
Farms into Farms of a Size for Scotch farming. On the Reme- 
dies proposed for the Over-population of Ireland. On Fisheries. 
On Factories. On Emigration - Page 41 

CHAP. IV. 

Notes on Emigration. Emigration by Sea no Remedy for Over- 
population. Emigration of small Capitalists no Relief to the 
Country. Expense and Inefficiency of Emigration at the public 
Expense. Its Injustice. Reasons why a poor Man should not 
emigrate — why a Man with a little saved Capital should not 
emigrate. The English too co-operative, and too far advanced 
in Civilisation, to emigrate with advantage. Emigration from 
Germany. Letters of Expatriation - - -55 

CHAP. V. 

Notes on the Causes of the Division and Subdivision of tenant 
Occupancies in Ireland — Want of Property — Want of Employ- 
ment — strong family Affection. Why the same Causes do not 
produce the same Effects in other Countries. Want of the Sense 
of Property among small Cotter-tenants. Strong Sense of Pro- 
perty among small Peasant-proprietors. The divisive Element 
only at work, the aggregative Element dormant in the social 
State of Ireland. The Manners, Way of Living, Costume of 
Peasant-proprietors conservative. Well-being in this social 
State. Intellectual and moral Condition of this Class. National 
Wealth and national Well-being not always the same. Advan- 
tages of the small- estate Occupancy. Which of the two social 
States is preferable. Importance of the Question. Duty of the 
Traveller to state both Sides of it impartially - - 79 



CONTENTS. XI 



CHAP. VI. 



Notes on the Disadvantages of the small-estate Occupancy of the 
Land of a Country. It is a stationary, not a progressive social 
State. Want of co-operative Industry. Want of Means to 
cultivate the Tastes of a higher Civilisation. The small Estates 
not always divided, but generally burdened with Payments to 
Coheirs by the equal Division of Land among the Children. 
Want of a Middle Class between the governed and the governing 
in this social State. The Equality of Condition in it not favour- 
able to Liberty. Want of Demand for, and the Means to pur- 
chase, the Objects of peaceful Industry, Want of any increasing 
Employment for the increasing Population in each Generation. 
The Youth necessarily thrown for Employment into military 
Service — Effects of this war Element in different Countries and 
different Ages. The History and Economy of this social State 
adverse to the Views of the Peace Congress. The true Balance 
between the old and new social State of Europe not to be found 
in this Generation - Page 93 



CHAP. VII. 

Notes on the Loire — on the Change in the French Character from 
Gaiety to Seriousness — on the Want of Self-government. Ex- 
travagant Scale of all public Works from this Want of Control. 
Centralisation and Non-centralisation illustrated in the Roads of 
France and of England. The Taste for Display in the French 
Character. Difference of the Objects on which Income is ex- 
pended in England and in France. Social Effects of the different 
Expenditure of equal Incomes by the French and English Family. 
The civilising Influence of the Diffusion of the Useful Arts 
greater than of the Fine Arts. On the Effects of government 
Interference with manufacturing Industry. Encouragement by 
the continental Governments of the Manufacture of Earthen- 
ware — the Effects. French Carts. Ploughs of different 
Countries. Working Cows and Heifers. Spade-work compared 
with Plough-work. Vine-culture. Touraine interesting to 
English Travellers — Houses — Manner of Living — Historical 
Connection with England - - - - 112 



Xll CONTENTS, 



CHAP. VIII. 

Notes on Land and Population on the Continent and in England. 
A Reserve of Land in England to meet an Increase of Popula- 
tion — none on the Continent — probable Consequences. On 
the Abolition of the Corn Laws as a conservative Measure for 
the English Landed Interest. Rents in Kind. High Farming 
not judicious with low Prices and Money Rents. On Measures 
resorted to in former Times for limiting the Increase of Popula- 
tion to the Amount of Employment. Every Country has its own 
Political Economy suited to its physical Circumstances. Guilds 
or Incorporations of Trades. — Is Labour a Property ? Socialism 
is a Revival of the Principle of the Guilds of the Middle Ages 
— the Principle and Results the same - - Page 147 



CHAP. IX. 

Notes on a Middle Class between the Government and the People. 
On the Reform of the Distribution of Land in Prussia. Fall of 
the Feudal Aristocracy. Establishment of Functionarism as the 
third Element in the social Body. Spirit of Functionarism — 
Dangerous to the Monarch and the People. Case of Torture 
inflicted in Hanover in 1818. Functionarism in Norway — in 
the United States. Effects of the Functionary System on In- 
dustry—on Education - - - * - 173 



CHAP. X. 

Notes on the German Students, or Burschenschaft* Numbers at 
the Prussian and Scotch Universities compared. Educational 
System of the German and Scotch Universities different in its 
Object and Results from that of the English. Why the German 
Students are considered dangerous to the established Govern- 
ments. The Restrictions on the Freedom of teaching throw 
public Opinion and social Action into the Hands of the Profes- 
sors at the Universities. The War with Denmark was produced 
by this social Power * 204 



CONTENTS. Xlll 



CHAP. XL 



Notes on the Laudwehr System. An ancient Establishment — 
revived after the Peace of Tilsit in 1807 by Prussia — its Effi- 
ciency proved in 1813, 1814 — its present Organisation — not 
suitable to Times of Peace. Oppressive and demoralising Effects 
of the Landwehr Service on the People. Landwehr and a Stand- 
ing Army compared. Effects of the three new Elements in the 
social Condition of the Continent. The Distribution of Land 
Functionarism and Landwehr Service considered. Notes on the 
public Buildings and Fortifications on the Continent. On Penal 
Labour on Fortifications. On the Abolition of Capital Punish- 
ment — why it cannot be abolished in our penal Code. On the 
Want of Self-respect in the continental Character — Notions of 
Liberty. Form of a Constitutional Government without the 
Reality of Freedom - - - - - Page 228 

CHAP. XII. 

Notes on the Town and Country Populations abroad and in 
England. On the Yice and Profligacy of London compared to 
other Capitals. Prostitution in London — in Paris. Moral 
Condition of the London Population. Habits, Character, and 
social State of the English and Scotch compared. Moral Tie in 
England between Landlord and Tenant. On the comparative 
Well-being of the Working Man on the Continent and in 
England. On the Burdens on the Continental Working Man. 
Military Service. Direct Taxes. Kopfsteuer or Poll-tax. 
Gewerbsteuer or Trade Tax. Class-tax in Prussia, Hanover, 
etc. Direct and indirect Taxes compared. Injustice of direct 
Taxation as a Substitute for indirect Taxes. Higher Well-being 
of the English Working Class. Advantage of the Continental 
Working Class in the easier Acquisition of Land - - 273 

CHAP. XIII. 

Notes on the Indications in Foreign and British Towns of a read- 
ing Public. Printing and Bookselling Establishments in Berlin 
and Edinburgh. Newspapers, Periodicals, Sects, Meeting-houses 
indicate a higher intellectual Condition of our Population. On 



XLV CONTENTS. 

the Rhine Provinces of Prussia — Landwehr and Conscription 
compared — better satisfied with the French than the Prussian 
Government. Disjointed State of the Prussian Kingdom. The 
Parts incapable of Union into one Nation. The Union of Scot- 
land with England misled the Congress of Vienna in the Par- 
tition of Europe in 1816. On Munich — the Fine Arts — 
Fresco Painting. Influence of the Fine Arts on Civilisation 
considered - ■ - - - - Page 312 



CHAP. XIV. 

Notes on a remarkable Difference between the Anglo-Saxon and 
the other Branches of the Teutonic Race, in the Love of Music. 
On Music and Musical Education — not suitable to the English 
State of Society. On Theatrical Representation. False Im- 
portance given to the social Influence of the Fine Arts on 
Civilisation _._-__ 348 



CHAP. XV. 

Notes on German Watering-places. Manners. Road to the Tyrol. 
Similarity of the Tyrol and Norway — Buildings — People. 
Kreut. Innsbruck. Landeck. Mais. Meran — beautiful 
Scenery — picturesque Costume. Mixed Races and pure Races 
of People. The Silk Culture — its Effects on the Condition of 
the People. The Roman Catholic Church — its Influence on 
the social State of the Middle Ages — still of Benefit as a third 
independent Power between the autocratic Governments of the 
Continent and the People. The Prussian Concordat with the 
Pope — its Failure as a useful or peaceful Agreement - 377 



CHAP. XVI. 

Notes on Frankfort in Spring 1849. The German Parliament — 
St. Paul's Church — the Members — Proportion from the differ- 
ent States — Proportion from the different Classes and Interests. 
The Club System. The Club Regulations. The Members Re- 
presentatives only of their Clubs, not of the German People. 



CONTENTS. XV 

Club Opinion not the genuine public Opinion. Club Regime 
introduced into English Legislation by the Corn-law League — 
its Danger. The Club-parliament of Frankfort — its Waste of 
Time — > its frivolous Discussions. Cause of the Failure of the 
Frankfort Parliament — the neglect of the religious Element. 
The Movement of 1848 in Germany traced to the Suppression 
by the King of Prussia of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, 
and of Ronge's German Catholic Church. Policy, Conduct, and 
Character of the late King of Prussia - - Page 409 



CHAP. XVII. 

Notes on the Policy and Conduct of Prussia in the German Move- 
ment of 1848, in the Schleswig-Holstein Affairs. Retributive 
Justice to Prussia and to Germany in the Results of the Schles- 
wig-Holstein "War. Real Importance of Schleswig in the Euro- 
pean System. On the German Constituent Assembly compared 
to the Norwegian of 1813. Superiority of the non-educated over 
the educated Body of Representatives. On Hamburgh — life in 
Hamburgh — Table d'Hote — Rainville's — Altona. Social En- 
joyment of the middle and lower Classes in Germany — its Effects 
— Advantages and Disadvantages — sanitary Condition — moral 
Condition. Hamburgh and Lubeck important military Posts for 
the new German Empire ----- 437 



CHAP. XVIII. 

Notes on the Scenery of Germany. Effects of Scenery on the 
imaginative Faculty of different Nations — on German Charac- 
ter. The Peninsula of Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland. The 
Limfiord. On the gradual Rising of the Land on the Baltic 
Side of the Scandinavian Peninsula. On Roads and Railroads 
on the Continent. Farm-houses and Aspect of the Country in 
Holstein. Rim of fertile Land on the Shores of the North Sea 
and Baltic. Surplus Labour. Surplus Land. Pauper Colonies 
— why unsuccessful. State of Peasant-proprietors in Holstein. 
A Protestant Convent — similar Institutions proposed. Pretz. 
Ploen t Eutin. Voss. Gothe - 476 



XVI CONTENTS. 



CHAP. XIX. 

Notes on Angeln. The Anglo-Saxons ~ Who were the Anglo- 
Saxons? Claim of the present Germans to be considered Anglo- 
Saxons — difference in the physical Circumstances and Charac- 
ter of the two Populations. The Cement which binds People 
together into a Nation wanting in Germany — GermanNational- 
ity not possible — conflicting Interests of the different Parts of 
Germany prevent a beneficial Unity or Nationality — federal 
Union only attainable. Social Condition of the Continental 
People — material Condition — intellectual Condition — incapa- 
city for Self-government or Liberal Constitutions - Page 508 



NOTES OF A TRAVELLER, 



CHAPTER I. 

NOTES ON EFFECTS OF STEAM-POWER ON SOCIAL RELATIONS. ON 

NOVELTY IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES. ON CALAIS AND DOVER. 

EUSTACE DE ST. PIERRE, BEAU BRUMMEL, EDW. HI. ON FLAN- 
DERS, CASSEL, THE FLEMISH DIALECT. DIFFERENCE OF SOCIAL 

STRUCTURE WHERE THE UNLATINIZED TEUTONIC DIALECTS PRE- 
VAIL. DIVISION OF THE LAND INTO SMALL ESTATES ON THE 

SEA-COASTS AND RIVER-SIDES OF EUROPE. DIVISION OF LAND 

ON THE CONTINENT. TENDENCY TO ITS AGGREGATION IN 

BRITAIN. NEW ELEMENTS IN THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE ABROAD. — 

DIFFERENCE OF THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLAND. — SUBJECTS 
FOR THE TRAVELLER'S CONSIDERATION. 

What a world of passengers in our steamer ! Princes, 
dukes, gentlemen, ladies, tailors, milliners, people of 
every rank and calling, all jumbled together. The 
power of steam is not confined to material objects. 
Its influences extend over the social and moral ar- 
rangements of mankind. Steam is the great demo- 
cratic power of our age ; annihilating the conventional 
distinctions, differences, and social distance between 
man and man, as well as the natural distances be- 
tween place and place. Observe that high and mighty 
Exclusive, sitting all by himself on the bench of the 

b 



2 EFFECTS OF STEAM-POWER ON SOCIAL RELATIONS. 

steamer's quarter-deck, wrapped up in his own self- 
importance and his blue travelling- cloak lined with 
white, and casting his looks of superiority around 
him. He is an English gentleman, no doubt, of family 
and fortune. What a great personage this I-by- 
myself-1 traveller would have been in the days of 
postchaises-and-four and sailing-packets ! Now, in the 
steam-boat, not a soul, not even the ship-dog, takes 
the least notice of his touch-me-not dignity. He looks 
grand, he looks my lord, in vain. Worse than want 
of respect is this want of notice at all, the being abso- 
lutely overlooked. The dinner-bell rings, and down 
must this great personage scramble with the rest of 
us; must eat, and drink, and carve, — and ask, and 
help, or be helped, — and talk, listen, and live, with 
the other passengers, or go without dinner, and starve; 
and nobody cares, or puts himself out of the way, for 
him. His grocer's clerk, perhaps, or his tailor's heir- 
apparent, outshines him ; or, it may be, puts down, in 
a cavalier tone, his assumption of superiority in the 
hail-fellow-well-met circle of passengers who are 
whisked along by this democratic power of steam, 
at equal pace and equal price, with equal rights and 
equal consideration. It is not the English nobility 
and gentry only who are cut down, by the steam 
demon, to the dimensions of ordinary mortals. The 
German potentate, who at home sits in whiskered 
magnificence at the window of his schloss, and may 
count every shirt laid on the green to bleach within 
the circle of his hereditary dominions and territorial 
sway, condescends, in these days of speed and economy, 
to save his state revenues, and travel by steam to visit 
his crowned cousins. Seated in the saloon of a Rhine 
steam-boat, he stares over his tawny moustachios, 



NOVELTY OF FOREIGN COUNTRIES. 3 

like an owl in a withered beech-hedge, at the free and 
easy crowd of passengers of all ranks and countries, 
who seem quite insensible of their proximity to so 
much grandeur. He discovers, perhaps, in his all- 
engrossing, talkative, vis-d-vis neighbour at dinner, 
whom the waiters fly to serve, the thriving draper of 
his own village-metropolis, returning from Manchester, 
with a fresh stock of goods and assurance, with which 
he feels quite at his ease, and sits altogether unan- 
nihilated in the sublime presence. Nay, horror of 
horrors ! the fellow calls for a bottle of higher-priced 
wine than his Serene Highness is drinking; nods, 
actually nods, to the thrice illustrious Herr ; tells him 
they must have seen each other somewhere before, 
and proposes a glass to their better acquaintance ! 
Where will the influences of steam-power end ? They 
began with the physical, and are extending over the 
social, political, and moral world. 

I envy the young traveller to whom all is novelty 
in a foreign country. What a delightful epoch in 
his existence is the first saunter, after landing from 
the steam-boat, through the streets and market-place 
of a foreign town, even of a poor decaying one like 
Calais ! He threads his way in ecstasy through the 
crowd of hucksters, and country women sitting in 
their brown woollen cloaks beside their baskets of 
eggs, butter, and vegetables. He goes peeping into 
every stall and shop-window ; and catching every 
sound and word, familiar enough to him in print, but 
which he never before heard uttered by the vulgar. 
It seems so strange to hear the words and phrases 
which he had studied, and got by heart, as a branch 
of polite education, used in common conversation by 

B 2 



4 NOVELTY OF FOREIGN COUNTRIES. 

the lowest of the people. He has almost to guess the 
meaning of what he knows by the eye, but not by 
the ear from any other mouth than his French 
teacher's. He ascribes to the speakers a refinement 
and intelligence which they have not, because they 
speak a language which to him has been a branch of 
refined education and intellectual exercise. Then, 
how pleasing to gaze at the unexpected novelty of 
the most ordinary objects ; at the high-peaked gable- 
ends of ancient houses, forming each side of narrow 
winding streets ; at the row above row of casement- 
windows, as if every street-front was half built of 
glass, — and which, although the glass is bad, and the 
wood-work wretched, gives a cheerful character to 
the meanest habitations abroad, and gives, what we 
want so much in our dwellings at home, light and air. 
The mist of novelty, like other mists, magnifies and 
beautifies the objects seen through it, but it must be 
dispelled before the traveller ventures to describe 
their true shapes and dimensions. He only gives his 
own impressions and feelings when he writes under 
the influence of novelty. When the vapour with 
which it invests all things has faded away, how 
coarse and ungainly appear to his English eye, and his 
English taste for neatness and perfect workmanship, 
all the utensils, instruments, and materiel of every- 
day life ! What unsubstantial show and ornament, 
where the conveniences, and even necessaries, of a 
comfortable housekeeping are either totally wanting, 
or rudely and imperfectly supplied ! The young 
traveller soon begins to observe, and to feel, if he has 
been bred in the neatness and comfort of an English 
household, that we enjoy at home, — and no mistake 
about it, — many more substantial well-adapted things, 



CALAIS AND DOVER. 5 

many more comfortable things, many more useful, 
well-contrived, and perfectly executed things about us 
in our daily life, than the wealthiest class in France 
or Germany have any idea of, or any taste for. We 
are centuries in advance of the Continental people in 
the application of the useful arts to the conveniences 
and comforts of ordinary life, and in our daily ma- 
terial existence. 

Calais is much more of a literary and historical 
lady than her sister Dover. Who ever heard of a 
Baron of the Cinque Ports, except at the ceremo- 
nial of a coronation ? But Sterne's Monk and the 
snuff-box, and La Fleur, and Marie, will make Calais 
and "Dessins" float visible down the stream of time 
a thousand generations after the Ship Inn, and the 
Mayors of Dover, and all the Barons and Lord 
Wardens of the Cinque Ports, past, present, and to 
come, the Duke of Wellington on his bronze steed 
among them, are numbered with the Mastodons and 
Megalosauri — things which have been. Sterne's 
imaginary personages will ever be realities, present, in 
every generation, as belonging to man, and will be so 
while mind, feeling, and the intellectual and moral 
nature of man exist. The conceits and affectations of 
Sterne, his laborious efforts to be easy, natural, original, 
and witty, do not suit the refined taste of our age, 
and Sterne is little thought of in modern English 
literature ; yet he touches the natural and the pathetic, 
and is the source of what is called originality in others 
who are but his imitators. A great school of senti- 
mental and pathetic writers arose in Germany, and 
copied the style of Sterne in overcharged feeling and 
expression about trifles. Goethe, in his early writings, 



6 EUSTACE DE ST. PIERRE, BEAU BRUMMEL, EDW. III. 

such as " Werther," took his inspiration not from 
nature, but from Laurence Sterne ; and Jean Paul 
Richter figures in German literature as the most 
original of writers, in his long-winded conceits, and 
heavy and laboured efforts at wit and novelty, of which 
the prototype is Sterne's " Tristram Shandy.' 7 

Eustace de St. Pierre, one of the true heroes of 
history, was not he a Calais Mayor ? Beau Brummel, 
was not he a denizen of Calais? The bloody Queen 
Mary died, she said, with Calais engraven on her 
heart. Lady Hamilton, with a heart as hard, — 
Mrs. Jordan, with the kindest of hearts, — died at Calais. 
It is a town in which very extraordinary contrasts 
have taken place. It is within probability, in the 
strange coincidences time brings about in human 
affairs, that in the same apartment in which Beau 
Brummel adjusted the tie of his cravat, Eustace de 
St. Pierre, four centuries before, may have put the 
rope round his neck, and he and his five fellow-citizens, 
haltered, and walking in procession to offer their lives 
to Edward III., to save their native town from his 
vengeance, may have descended the same stairs, and 
have issued from the same doorway, which Beau 
Brummel entered and ascended to look from the 
garret window at his " fat friend," George IV., on his 
journey to Hanover. Types of their times were these 
personages all. King Edward, his queen Philippa, 
Eustace de St. Pierre and his five townsmen, types of 
one age, — George IV. and Beau Brummel types of 
another ; types of an age of heroism, and of an age 
of starch. 

In and around Calais, for a league or two, mud or 
barren sandy downs prevail. This narrow belt of 



FLANDERS — CASSEL — THE FLEMISH DIALECT. 7 

sand-hills skirts and defends the north-west coast of 
the Continent, from the Scaw point in Jutland to 
the chalk ridge between Calais and Boulogne, and 
is exchanged only for artificial embankments, or sea- 
dykes, at the mouths of the rivers, the Eyder, Elbe, 
Weser, Ems, Ehine, Scheldt, where new land has been 
formed by the deposit of alluvial soil against the 
original sand-hills or gravel-banks of the old ocean 
coast. When we cross this narrow belt at Calais, and 
take the road to Belgium and the Rhine by St. Omer, 
we come to a flat country of a rich loamy soil, covered 
to the distant horizon with glorious crops of rye, 
wheat, barley, rape for seed and for oil, and luxuriant 
red clover, saintfoin, and lucerne, for stall-feeding. 
Cassel is a little town standing on the summit of a 
protuberance in the middle of this vast and rich plain 
of Flanders, — a wart on the fair bosom of the Flemish 
lady. This steep isolated little hill appears to be of 
volcanic origin, its rock similar to the stone of which 
the Coliseum at Rome is built. In the little town 
which covers its summit, we come upon a different 
social as well as geological formation. The names of 
the streets, and the inscriptions on sign-posts and 
shop-boards, are given in two languages, the French 
and the Flemish. We are upon a point of the line 
dividing the Celtic and Teutonic races. The Flemish 
branch of the Teutonic stock begins here, both in the 
language and in the physical appearance, the manners, 
and the character of the people, and extends north- 
wards along the coast, meeting the Frisian and Danish 
branches of the same stock at the Eyder. The Fle- 
mish, the Dutch, the Piatt Deutsch, and the Frisian 
dialects, are offsets of one original old Teutonic tongue, 
and they differ much less from each other in their 

B 4 



8 DIFFERENCE OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE WHERE THE 

formation and construction as languages, and pro- 
bably much less from the old original Teutonic type, 
than they do from the cultivated modern German of 
literature. The latter gradually adopted the Latin 
construction in the middle ages, Latin being the 
language of literature, law, and of the Church, from 
the fourth century to the Reformation. The vulgar 
dialects were abandoned to the vulgar, and remained 
unaltered in the mouth of the vulgar. These Teu- 
tonic dialects are still strangers to the Latin colloca- 
tion of words in the sentence, to the distinctions of 
genders and cases in the use of the articles and nouns, 
and to the other latinizations which have been imposed 
on the cultivated German language. Where these 
unlatinized ancient dialects prevail, a difference, as 
remarkable as that of language, prevails in the social 
structure and the condition of the people. The land 
is divided into small estates of working peasant-pro- 
prietors. This has probably been the original social 
state of the countries beyond the pale of the Roman 
empire, and beyond its influence on their institutions, 
laws, and languages. In many countries within its 
pale, two causes prevented the aggregation of land, 
in ancient times, into large estates in the hands of a 
small number of feudal nobles holding exclusively 
the property in the soil, and holding the people on it 
as their serfs. In the early middle ages, and even in 
the ages when the Roman power was still vigorous 
and respected, land adjacent to the sea-coast, or even 
to navigable streams at a considerable distance from 
the sea-coast, was not safe from the depredations of 
the Saxon and northern pirates, whose booty con- 
sisted principally in agricultural products ; and it 
was exposed also to the loss, by desertion or capture, 



UNLATINIZED TEUTONIC DIALECTS PREVAIL. 9 

of the slaves or serfs who were the working-stock of 
the great landowner. A feudal nobility, like that of 
the inland countries of the Continent, could scarcely 
arise, or come to any permanent and general establish- 
ment in the sea-coast countries, or in those on the 
navigable rivers, for property could only be defended, 
or removed from the sudden grasp of the piratical 
marauders, by a peasantry having interests and pro- 
perty of their own to defend, or remove. We see on 
the Rhine, for instance, at the present day, remains 
of feudal power, in castles and strongholds, above 
Cologne; while the country below Cologne accessible 
to the sudden attack of the piratical rovers, is remark- 
ably bare of those monuments of the power and bar- 
barism of the great nobles of the feudal ages. Every 
river in Europe tells the same tale in its course, — viz. 
that towards its mouth the land has never been feu- 
dalised, but has always been held by small peasant 
proprietors. The Scheldt, the various outlets of the 
Maese and Rhine, the Ems, Weser, Elbe, and Eyder, 
all concur in showing this social formation at the 
river-mouths, and the coasts between them, as one 
different now, and in all past ages, from the social 
formation of the inland countries of the Continent. 
The other cause for this tendency to a small-estate 
occupancy of the land on all the coasts and river-sides 
of Europe is, that a great proportion of this sea-coast 
and river-side land has been originally gained, and 
can only now be defended, from the sea or river floods, 
by the co-operation, exertion, watchfulness, and in- 
dustry of a numerous body of small working-proprie- 
tors, raising embankments and dykes, and cutting 
drains, to secure small areas of the silt, or mud bank, 
contiguous to their fields, from the waters, and 



10 DIVISION OF THE LAND INTO SMALL ESTATES 

having a common interest in their work, and a self- 
government in each neighbourhood for directing their 
united efforts. The feudal baron in his castle, with a 
domain around it peopled by vassals or serfs having 
no property or permanent interest in the soil, could 
never have gained or defended from the sea or rivers 
those small embanked areas, often not more than an 
acre or two in extent, of mud or silt, and called pol- 
ders in Holland, and cogs in Friesland, which have 
been taken in by degrees, from ebb-tide to ebb-tide, 
by the working peasant-proprietor, and added to his 
own contiguous little field acquired in the same way 
by the preceding generation. The whole of these 
small acquisitions are secured at last permanently 
from the waters, by a sea or river dyke constructed 
by the united intelligence and labour of all the ad- 
joining peasant-proprietors deriving benefit from it. 
Holland, a great part of the Netherlands, and of the 
whole coast-side and river-side lands from the most 
westerly point of Jutland, the Blaawands Hoek north 
of the Eyder, round to Ostend south of the Scheldt, 
where the sand-hill formation becomes a continuous 
sea- defence, not broken, as in Holland, into detached 
downs, and joins the chalk cliff at Boulogne, have been 
gained in this way, little by little, from the sea, or 
from the rivers. The acquisitions of each generation 
may be traced by the old embankments, far back now 
from the waters, and neglected, because new advances 
and dykes, and the natural rise of the level in the 
course of ages, by vegetable matter added to the sur- 
face, make it unnecessary to keep them up. It is 
evident that feudality could have no natural seat here, 
— could never furnish the social machinery to gain 
and protect such land from the inroad of the waters, 



ON THE SEA-COASTS AND RIVER-SIDES OF EUROPE. 11 

or to defend its products from the Saxon and Danish 
freebooters. A peasant-proprietary, enjoying, under 
every form of government and change of rulers, rights 
and self-government in their own local affairs, un- 
known to the feudalised inhabitants of the inland 
parts of the Continent, has, from the earliest ages, 
occupied the land adjacent to the sea-coasts and river- 
mouths, and, in social arrangements, character, phy- 
sical and intellectual influences, and modes of exist- 
ence, forming in reality a distinct nation, — distinct 
3ven in their dialects of the Teutonic from the inha- 
bitants of the interior of Germany. This sea-coast 
nation of small proprietors has, at this day, as little 
in common with the population of Germany as the 
seafaring Anglo-Saxons of the fifth century could 
have had with the hunting tribes of the ancient Ger- 
mans bred in the Hercanian Forest. Elements totally 
different enter into their social existence. The germs 
of freedom, of self-government, of liberal institutions, 
are found in this population, from the physical cir- 
cumstances in which it exists, even where these are 
overlaid by a despotical form of political government. 
It is remarked by the traveller Kohl, in his observa- 
tions on Schleswig and Holstein, that, in the districts 
of Eyderstad and Ditmarsh, under the autocratic rule 
of Denmark, the people elect their own functionaries, 
and manage for themselves their own local affairs ; 
and only one estate in the whole tract from the Eyder 
to the Elbe is held by a nobleman. We find in the 
history of all ages and countries, from the North Cape 
to Gibraltar, that liberty, however oppressed, sits, in 
some shape or other, on the shore side or the river bank. 
In Flanders, Holland, Friesland, about the estua- 
ries of the Scheldt, Maese, Rhine, Ems, Weser, Elbe, 



12 DIVISION OF LAND ON THE CONTINENT. 

and Eyder, in a great part of Westphalia and other 
districts of Germany, in Denmark, Sweden, and Nor- 
way, and, in the south of Europe, in Switzerland, the 
Tyrol, Lombardy, and Tuscany, the peasants have, 
from very early times, been the proprietors of a great 
proportion of the land. France and Prussia have, 
in our times, been added to the countries in which 
the land is divided into small estates of working 
peasant-proprietors. In every country of Europe, 
under whatever form of government, however re- 
motely and indirectly affected by the wars and 
convulsions of the French Eevolution, and how- 
ever little the laws, institutions, and spirit of the 
government may as yet be in accordance with this 
social state of the people, the tendency during this 
century has been to the division and distribution of 
the land into small estates of a working peasant-pro- 
prietary, — not to its aggregation into large estates 
of a nobility and gentry. This has been the real 
revolution in Europe. The only exception is Great 
Britain. The tendency with us during the present 
century has been directly the reverse. It has been to 
aggregate small estates into large ; and in Scotland, 
and a great part of England, to aggregate even small 
tenant occupancies into large farms. What have 
been the effects on the condition — on the physical 
and moral well-being — of the people of these two 
opposite social systems, — of the one of which Great 
Britain is the type, and now almost the only great 
example among the European countries ; and of the 
other of which the most ancient type, and that which 
may most readily be compared with the first, is, 
perhaps, this country of Flanders ? 

In France and Prussia, the distribution of the land 



ITS EFFECTS ON SOCIETY. 13 

through the social body has not been of sufficiently 
long standing to admit of its results on the social 
state and condition of the people being fairly appre- 
ciated by the traveller. It is but a change of yester- 
day forced upon those countries by the French Revo- 
lution, and the subsequent wars, and for which the 
people, who became suddenly the proprietors of the 
land on which they had lived as serfs, were not pre- 
pared. It is not a social arrangement, growing up 
in a country by the slow and gradual operation of 
natural causes, and carrying along with it, in its 
progress among the population, the character, con- 
duct, sense of property, and the prudence which 
belong to proprietors. It was a sudden leap. The 
serf, the leibeigen peasant of yesterday, became a free 
man to-day, and a proprietor the next day, of a part 
of that domain on which he was born, bred, and 
adscriptus glebce like one of the working cattle, and 
without any preparatory training for his new con- 
dition, or any hereditary traditions of the conduct 
and character suitable to it. This mighty social 
change, so rapidly developed, and spread over the 
whole Continent, is the most important result, by far, 
of the French Revolution, the most pregnant with 
future good or future evil, of any produced by that 
great event. The rise and fall of dynasties, constitu- 
tions, or forms of government, sink into insignifi- 
cance compared to this all-important revolution in the 
social economy of the European people, this new social 
state, as it may justly be called, to which the form, 
spirit, and administration of government, and law, in 
Europe, must be adapted if they are to rest on a 
permanent foundation. The memorable events of the 
year 1848 show that the Continental sovereigns have 



14 NEW ELEMENTS IN THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE ABROAD. 

not seen, or have misunderstood, the tendency, spirit, 
and strength of this new social element, which they 
themselves, in a great measure, created; and prove that 
even now, in the beginning of its development, the 
old institutions and spirit of the Continental govern- 
ments are not suited to it, and must be made conform- 
able to it, either by violence, or timely adjustment. 

By the French K evolution, and its direct or indirect 
influences on the governing and the governed of every 
European country, three new elements have been in- 
troduced into the social economy of the Continental 
people, new, at least, in the extent of development, 
and power, they have now attained. The first is, this 
general distribution of the land into small estates of 
peasant-proprietors. The second, a necessary con- 
sequence of the first, is the extinction of the social 
importance of the former great landholders, the aristo- 
cracy, gentry, or nobles, as a third influential body 
between the monarch and the people, and the substi- 
tution of a new element, functionarism, instead of 
aristocracy, in the social structure, as the support of 
monarchical government. The third is the Landwehr 
institution, by which, instead of a distinct class of the 
community being kept up by the state as a standing 
army, the whole community, all the male population 
of age and strength to carry arms, are embodied, 
trained for three years in the ranks of a regiment of 
the line as common soldiers, and constitute the main 
military force of the country. 

What are the effects and tendencies of these three 
new elements introduced, since the beginning of this 
century, into the social economy of the Continent ? 
They are scarcely known in ours. We have no body 
of peasant-proprietors of land ; we have no body of 



DIFFERENCE IN THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLAND. 15 

government functionaries, no beamptenstand, with 
rank, social influence, and power above the nobility, 
gentry, proprietors, and capitalists of the country, 
and forming a distinct class of more weight and im- 
portance in public affairs than any other in the com- 
munity, — or, more properly, having the sole manage- 
ment and voice in local or general affairs, to the 
exclusion of any other class. We have no Landwehr, 
or compulsory military service, placing every able- 
bodied male individual of the whole population, 
without exception, exemption, or substitution, in the 
ranks of a regiment for three years, and then calling 
him out annually for military duty and exercise, for 
several weeks, as long as he is fit for service. We 
are, in our social life, arrangements, and institutions, 
much more distinct and widely apart from the Con- 
tinental people, since the peace and settlement of 
Europe in 1815, than we ever were at any former 
period of our history. The philanthropists who are 
flattering themselves that a peace of thirty years, and 
an unexampled extension of commercial affairs and 
personal relations between individuals of different 
countries, are rapidly assimilating all nations to one 
common type of civilisation, and are bringing on a 
happy period when wars will cease, conventional 
differences will no longer divide nations, and all 
disputes between countries will be settled by arbi- 
tration at a Peace Congress, are not looking at the 
different elements of society which have been growing 
up on the Continent since the last peace, — elements 
sown in the war, and which are only adapted to and 
preparative for war, and a military organisation and 
spirit of society. We are in reality now, in the 19th 
century, more the toto divisi orbe Britanni than we 



16 THE TRAVELLER^ ATTENTION DEMANDED BY 

were in the 4th, or the 14th. The spirit and prin- 
ciple of our social institutions are more different now 
than they were then, from those of the Continental 
people. Whether the new social state on which the 
Continent is entering, or the old in which this country- 
is remaining, be the best adapted for the end of all 
social arrangements, the well-being, moral and phy- 
sical, of the individuals composing the social body, is 
a question not, perhaps, to be answered in the present 
generation. We know, indeed, in this country, the 
ground on which our social structure with its economy 
is standing; we know its faults and its merits, its 
good and its bad productions. But the three new 
elements in Continental society, — the division and 
distribution of landed property, functionarism, and 
the Landwehr institution, — are but now beginning 
to expand, and show indications of their fruits. The 
Continental people themselves cannot foresee what 
these fruits may be. To watch their progress, as the 
botanist would that of unknown seeds or shrubs in his 
garden, to collect facts and observations on the origin, 
growth, probable tendencies, and apparent effects and 
qualities of these three new elements in the social 
state of Europe, should be the object of the traveller 
on the Continent in the present times. He cannot 
expect to be amusing in his account of countries and 
scenes which every one is familiar with in our tra- 
velling generation ; but he may be suggestive. The 
old materials which would have filled his three 
volumes in former days, — the dining here, and sleep- 
ing there, the good road or the bad, the disasters of a 
broken axle, or a lame off-horse, — have ceased to 
interest. Travel-readers have become travellers 
themselves, and scamper in their steam-boots seven 



IMPORTANT AND UNHACKNEYED TOPICS. 17 

leagues an hour, by land and sea, over all the domain 
of common-place which, in the last generation, was 
the undisputed property of the family of tour and 
travel writers. The traveller now must either keep 
his observations to himself, if he has only visited the 
well-known countries of Europe familiar to every- 
body, or he must direct the public attention to higher 
subjects than his personal adventures, and the details 
of the road ; and give his observations on the political 
and social economy, the institutions, mind, and moral 
and material condition, of the Continental people. He 
has a higher vocation, a wider field, and nobler sub- 
jects, than the traveller of former days. He is the 
historian of the present ; not, indeed, of the present 
events, scenes, and revolutions of the day, but of 
those changes in spirit, and character, of those new 
social arrangements, and institutions, which are pro- 
ducing the present revolutions, scenes, and events, 
and which threaten greater at no distant period. I 
propose in these notes to suggest to other travellers 
various subjects of observation, as they occurred to 
me, on the social economy of the people of the Con- 
tinent. I do not offer my own views or conclusions 
on those subjects as correct, and undeniable. I shall 
be content if they only suggest matter of inquiry, 
consideration, and comparison, to old travellers sated 
with mere sight-seeing on the Continent, and to young 
travellers who are apt to see nothing but sights on 
their travels ; and to bring them to the conviction I 
have come to, — that, upon the whole, we are not 
behind other people in well-being, and good govern- 
ment. 



18 OCCUPANCY OF LAND IN FLANDERS 



CHAP. II. 



NOTES ON THE SMALL-ESTATE OCCUPANCY OF LAND IN FLANDERS 
AS COMPARED WITH THE LARGE-ESTATE AND LARGE-FARM OC- 
CUPANCY IN SCOTLAND. — HUSBANDRY LN FLANDERS AND SCOT- 
LAND COMPARED. STALL-FEEDING AND SAVING OF MANURE LN 

FLANDERS. — SMALL-ESTATE HUSBANDRY COMPARED WITH LARGE- 
FARM HUSBANDRY. — SCOTCH FARMING AND IMPROVEMENTS. 

THELR EFFECTS ON THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND. 

INTRODUCTION OF THE SCOTCH SYSTEM OF FARMING INTO 

IRELAND. — THEORY AND RESULTS OF THE SCOTCH SYSTEM OF 
FARMING EXAMINED. SMALL PEASANT -PROPRIETORS AND PEA- 
SANT-TENANTS. — THEIR HUSBANDRY AND SOCIAL CONDITION COM- 
PARED. — ECONOMY OF LABOUR, THE BASIS OF SCOTCH FARMING. 



In Flanders, and in those countries or districts of 
Germany in which the land has, for ages, been 
divided into small estates of working peasant pro- 
prietors, the traveller may expect to find some con- 
sequences of this small-estate occupancy of the land, 
visible in the physical, intellectual, and social con- 
dition of the people. The state of agriculture com- 
pared to that of countries possessed, and occupied, 
as England and Scotland are, under the opposite 
system of large estates and large farms, the relation 
of subsistence to population under each system, the 
good in each, and the evil in each, may at least be 
guessed at by the traveller. Good or bad farming, 
abundant or scanty crops on the ground, well-being 
or want, employment or idleness among a people, are 
obvious facts on which he may venture to speculate. 
His speculations may be wrong, yet if his observations 



COMPARED WITH THAT OF SCOTLAND. 19 

be correct, he has not travelled, and observed, in 
vain, for others will dig deeper, and discover the true 
root of what he has observed. Here, in Flanders, 
from Calais, by St. Omer, to Lisle, Belgium, and 
Prussia, a route as well known to English travellers 
as the road from London to York, the division of the 
land into small estates of working peasant-proprietors 
is painted upon the face of the country. The whole 
expanse is like a carpet, divided into small compart- 
ments of different shades and hues of green, according 
to the different crops of which each farmer has a 
little patch on his little estate. Two different kinds 
of crop may often be seen on one rig, or bed ; and five 
or six acres together under one kind of crop, are not 
common. There being no hedges or inclosures, no 
grass fields for pasture, and no uncultivated corners 
or patches, the whole country looks like one vast 
bleach-field covered with long webs of various colours 
and shades. The land is evidently divided into very 
small portions of property. The traveller cannot be 
mistaken in this observation. Now, as this state of 
property is of old standing here in Flanders, and not, 
as in the rest of France, an arrangement of recent 
date, what have been the results on the material con- 
dition of the people, or their agriculture, in the first 
place, on the amount of constant employment it 
affords them, on their numbers in proportion to their 
means of subsistence, on their food, lodging, clothing, 
on their moral and intellectual character? The con- 
dition of the people here must be the type of that to 
which the whole of Europe, excepting Great Britain, 
is tending, and which will be universal on the Con- 
tinent in a few generations. Here, if there be truth 
in theory, all the evil of a division and subdivision of 

c 2 



20 HUSBANDRY IN FLANDERS AND SCOTLAND. 

land, down to the minimum — the Irish minimum — 
of a potato-bed for the subsistence of the occupant 
and his family, must be fully developed, and, as in 
Ireland, must have reached its extreme. Here, over- 
population in proportion to food must be excessive ; 
here the incompatibility of small farms with agricul- 
tural improvement and productiveness, must be 
apparent ; and the superiority, for national wealth 
and well-being, of the cultivation of a country in 
large farms, occupied by tenants of capital and skill, 
as in the south of Scotland, over the cultivation of a 
country cut up into little estates of ten or twelve 
acres, farmed by working peasant-proprietors and 
their families, must be striking, and altogether unde- 
niable. To see and judge for myself, I have repeatedly 
visited this and other parts of the Continent, in which 
the land is generally in the hands of small peasant- 
proprietors, and has been so for ages. Here this 
social arrangement admits of a clear comparison with 
that which now prevails, in its full integrity, in Britain 
only. The soil is not superior to the average of the 
good soils of England and Scotland; the climate is 
much the same ; and the agricultural products nearly 
the same. The comparison is not confused with pro- 
ducts or employments connected with husbandry, not 
common to both countries. Where wine, or silk, as 
in the south of Europe, — or timber, tar, and potash, 
as in the north, — enter into the list of agricultural 
products, or give beneficial employment and profit to 
the small farmer, the comparison is less clear and 
distinct than with Flanders, in which the crops, and 
employments furnished by the land, are the same in 
kind as in England or Scotland. 

Will any Scotch farmer, " of capital and skill," from 



STALL-FEEDING IN FLANDERS. 21 

the Lothians, venture to say that he has his farm 
of 200 or 300 acres in such good heart, in such a 
clean garden-like condition, so free from weeds, and 
carrying, all over it, such luxuriant crops, and pro- 
ducing so much food per acre for man and beast, as 
an equal number of the acres now before me in this 
tract of country ? Has any farmer in Scotland or 
England such crops of red clover, lucerne, and other 
green succession- crops, as are now, in spring, being 
cut, or coming on for being cut, in succession, on 
these small patches of farms, for the summer stall- 
feeding of cattle in the house ? There are no cattle 
in the fields, and no pasture-fields for them, in the 
ordinary course of husbandry, on these small estates. 
All are kept in-cloors, in summer as well as in winter ; 
and all the land, not in grain crops, is under green 
crops, for their support. The fodder is cut and 
carried to the cattle, fresh, twice a-day, and the cut- 
ting and carrying employs the whole family. This 
stall-feeding of cattle all summer in -doors, and the 
saving thereby of the manure, which is the object of 
it, during six months of the year in which the manure 
is positively thrown away by our system of pasturage 
in fields of permanent, or of second or third year's sown 
grass, is a husbandry scarcely known among our large 
farmers. It may, indeed, be reasonably doubted if it 
would be practicable on a large farm. To cut and 
carry green fodder for half a dozen cattle, by the 
labour of the family, is an operation very different in 
expense from hiring labour to cut and carry the 
whole summer fodder of the cattle-stock of a large 
farm. In gardening and husbandry, and even in 
trade and manufactures, there are operations which 
are practicable and profitable on a small scale, but 

c 3 



22 SAVING OF MANURE. 

which would not be so on a great scale ; and many 
answer well on a great scale, which would not answer 
at all in a small way. It will not be denied that this 
summer stall-feeding, whether practicable or not on a 
great scale, produces more manure from the land, than 
if the land were given up to pasture every fourth or 
fifth year, or oftener, according to the rotation of 
crops on the farm. Except the portion of its grass 
made into hay for winter fodder, none of the produce 
of the pastured land of a large farm is converted into 
manure that is profitable ; for the manure dropped 
about by cattle grazing over a field, is altogether lost, 
and unprofitable for the land. On every large farm 
under what is called a good rotation of crops, one- 
fourth or one-fifth of its arable land is out of culti- 
vation every year from want of manure, and yet is 
producing none. Manure, abundance of manure, is 
allowed by all to be the basis of agricultural pros- 
perity, either to the individual farmer or to the 
country ; and although lime, bone-dust, or guano, 
may raise great crops, unless the crops so raised pro- 
duce manure, additional manure to the dunghill and 
the fields, the land of a farm, or of a garden, or of a 
country, cannot be kept in heart, and these expensive 
applications turn out a short-lived delusion. If the 
farmer were to apply bone-dust or guano to raise a 
turnip crop, and, instead of converting his fine turnip 
crop into manure for his farm, by keeping a suitable 
winter stock of cattle to consume it, if he were to cart 
one-fourth of his turnips into the sea, would not his 
neighbours pronounce the man mad ? Yet in what 
is he more mad than the farmer who has one-fourth 
of his farm every year under grass, and, instead of 
turning the whole of the produce of this area of land 



SMALL AND LARGE FARMS COMPARED. 23 

into manure, by stall-feeding cattle with the green 
crops which might be raised in succession upon it, 
throws away one-half or two-thirds of its surface by 
pasturing cattle over it all summer ? Excepting the 
portion of it cut for hay, as the first year's sown grass, 
the whole produce of the rest, that is of the fields in 
second and third year's grass, might as well be carted 
into the sea, as far as regards the production of 
manure for the farm. It may be practically true, 
that the sowing a succession of green crops for 
summer fodder for cattle in the stall, the cutting, 
carrying, tending, cleaning, may not be profitable, nor 
even possible, unless we are talking of a cow-feeder's 
stock of half-a-dozen cattle and sheep, and maybe utter 
nonsense if applied to the fields and farm stock of a 
large farm of two or three hundred acres. But if the 
whole area of a country, its whole arable surface, be 
occupied. and cultivated in such garden-beds, and the 
whole kept in garden-farms producing such garden- 
crops, and returning manure sufficient to keep such 
garden-farms perpetually in heart, and full bearing ; 
this agricultural system is surely more favour- 
able to national wealth and well-being, as far as 
these are connected with agriculture, than that 
of large farms occupying the face of the country, 
and one-fourth of the land that is arable, and only 
cultivated in its turn, lying waste, and useless, 
as far as regards the production of manure, and, 
consequently, of food for man, and merely grazed 
over, from the want of manure to keep it, like a 
garden, in a state of constant productiveness. The 
stock of cattle and of people will be greater under 
this garden- cultivation of a country ; and the same 
principle, viz., the visible amount of food for a given 

c 4 



24 SMALL-ESTATE HUSBANDRY 

number and no more, either of cattle or of people, 
will keep the stock of both within the limits of a pro- 
fitable and suitable subsistence on each little farm. 
The luxuriance of the crops here, in Flanders, shows 
that the stock of cattle producing manure must be 
greater, or the manure must be better preserved, than 
in our large-farm husbandry ; for no such crops can 
be seen with us, unless on some small pet field. The 
clean state of the crops, not a weed in a mile of coun- 
try, for they are all hand- weeded out of the land, and 
applied for fodder or manure ; the careful digging of 
every corner which the plough cannot reach; the 
head-lands, and ditch- slopes down to the water edge, 
and even the circle round single trees close up to the 
stem, being all dug, and under crop of some kind, — 
show that the stock of people to do all this minute 
hand- work must be very much greater than the land 
employs with us. The rent-paying farmer, on a nine- 
teen years' lease, could not afford eighteen pence or 
two shillings a-day of wages for doing such work, be- 
cause it never could make him any adequate return. 
But to the owner of the soil it is worth doing such 
work by his own and his family's labour at odd hours, 
because it is adding to the perpetual fertility and 
value of his own property. He may, apparently, be 
working for a less return than ordinary day's wages ; 
and, it may be, is making but a bare subsistence, 
worse than that of a hired farm-servant, or a labourer 
on day's wages on a large farm ; but, in reality, his 
earnings are greater than those of any hired servant 
or labourer, however well paid, because they are in- 
vested in the improvement of his own land, and in 
the continual advance of his own condition by its in- 
creasing fertility, in consequence of his labour be- 



AND LARGE-FARM HUSBANDRY. 25 

stowed on it. His piece of land is to him his savings 
bank, in which the value of his labour is hoarded up, 
to be repaid to him at a future day, and secured to 
his family after him. He begins with a potato-bed 
on the edge of a rough barren piece of land, and with 
the miserable diet it affords him ; but, the land 
being his own, he gets on, by the application of his 
labour to it, to crops of rye, wheat, flax, sown grasses, 
and to the comforts of a civilised subsistence. Where 
land, whether it be a single farm, a district, or a 
whole country, has not merely to produce food, fuel, 
clothing, lodging, in short, subsistence in a civilised 
way, to those employed on it, but also a rent to 
great proprietors, and a profit to large farmers, the 
tenants of the landowners, it is evident that only 
the land of the richest quality can be let for cul- 
tivation, and can afford employment. What cannot 
afford rent to the landlord, and profit to the tenant, 
as well as a subsistence to the labourer, cannot be 
taken into cultivation at all, until the better sort of 
land becomes so scarce that the inferior must be re- 
sorted to, and, from the scarcity and consequent 
dearness of the better, can afford a rent and profit 
also. This appears to be the glimmering of meaning 
in the foggy theory of rent given us by our great 
political economists. They forget that God Almighty 
did not create the land for the purpose of paying 
rents to country gentlemen, and profits to gentlemen- 
farmers, but to subsist mankind by their labour upon 
it ; and that a very large proportion of the land of 
this world, which never could be made to feed the 
labourers on it, and to yield besides a surplus of 
produce affording rent and profits to another class, 
could very well subsist the labourers, and in a com- 



26 SCOTCH FARMING AND IMPROVEMENTS. 

fortable civilised way too, if that were all it had to 
do. It could produce to them food, fuel, clothing, 
lodging, or value equivalent to these requirements 
of a civilised subsistence, but could not produce a 
surplus for rent, and profit, over and above their own 
civilised subsistence. The labour applied to such 
land is not thrown away, or unreproductive ; it is 
adding every year to national wealth and well-being, 
although not producing rent and profits, because it is 
gradually fertilising the soil of the country, is feeding 
the population of small landowners working upon it, 
and supporting them in a civilised and assured mode 
of subsistence, which is gradually improving with the 
improvement of the soil. 

What a cackling and braying, some forty years ago, 
at agricultural dinners, farmers' clubs, and county 
meetings, about Scotch farming ! From Thurso- 
water to the river Trent, the land resounded with 
the praises of Scotch farming, Scotch leases, and 
Scotch rents. The Sir Johns and Sir Josephs of 
those days, with a board of agriculture at their tails, 
were flapping their wings and screaming with delight 
at the vast improvements to be effected by the Scotch 
system of land-letting and farming. If printed paper 
were as good to lay upon land as bone-dust or guano, 
— and probably it may, — a large proportion of the 
arable land of the united kingdoms might have been 
top-dressed with agricultural reports, transactions of 
the honourable board, farmers' journals, and treatises 
on Scotch husbandry. Improving is one thing, im- 
provement is another ; and the two do not always run 
together abreast, or follow each other in tandem. 
What has been the improvement, what the benefit to 



CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE NOT IMPROVED. 27 

the great mass of the people of Scotland, by this im- 
proving ? Rents, it will at once be answered, have 
been doubled, trebled, quadrupled, since it began, 
some sixty years ago ; and as the large farmers, or 
tenants of adequate capital and skill, who pay those 
increased rents, are also making greater profits, as 
well as their landlords higher rents, it is evident that 
the land is now sending greater quantities of food to 
market, that there is a corresponding improvement, in 
short, in the productiveness of the land ; and Swift or 
Burke has told us, that he is a benefactor of mankind, 
and has accomplished a great improvement for society, 
who makes two ears of corn grow where only one 
grew before. But softly. Let us examine this pro- 
position. What is pithily said is not therefore 
necessarily true. One should be always on his guard 
against these well-said and pithily expressed sayings. 
Unless in mathematics and religion, there is no 
squeezing a general truth into the nut-shell of an 
axiom. Swift or Burke, or whoever said it, forgot, 
that unless those who raise the two ears of corn can 
also eat them, or enjoy, at least, a part and portion 
in them, it is no improvement in their condition, and 
they are the great mass of the population of a country, 
but only a benefit and improvement to the small 
body of landowners, and great tenants, to whom the 
corn belongs. The labourer in Virginia, or Carolina, 
has no benefit from his master's raising two hogs- 
heads of tobacco or rice, where only one was pro- 
duced before. This additional productiveness is no 
improvement in his lot or condition, whether he be 
slave or free. He is not better fed, clothed, lodged, 
or remunerated with higher wages, in consequence of 
it. Is the Scotch labourer in husbandry better fed, 



28 SCOTCH FARMING! IN IRELAND. 

lodged, or clothed now, than he was sixty years ago, 
although the rents and profits of landlords and 
tenants have doubled, trebled, or quadrupled ? This 
additional gain from the land is an improvement 
only to those who, as landlords, large farmers, fac- 
tors, lawyers, bankers, are connected with the manu- 
facture of food from land. But what are those 
classes, compared to the great mass of the population 
of Scotland ? The class of landed proprietors in 
Scotland does not, it is said, exceed Hye or six 
thousand individuals, and probably all who derive 
any direct benefit by this improvement will not 
amount to a hundred thousand persons in a popula- 
tion of two millions five hundred thousand. Of what 
benefit is it to the remaining two millions four hun- 
dred thousand, that three or four times as much 
grain is raised and sent to market, if only half as 
many of them are employed and subsisted by raising 
it, as lived from the land before this improvement in 
agriculture ? Ireland is a pregnant instance of a 
country raising, and exporting to market, — even in 
the midst of the unprecedented famine of 1847, in 
which thousands of the people perished from want or 
deficiency of food, — vast quantities of agricultural 
produce ; and of landlords, in ordinary years, deriving 
great rents, and large farmers, factors, agents, 
lawyers, deriving great profits, directly or indirectly, 
from the land of Ireland ; and yet the great mass of 
the population steeped in misery and poverty, and in 
food, clothing, and lodging, sunk far below the 
standard of a civilised subsistence. 

Many Irish landlords believe, and act upon the 
belief, that the redemption of Ireland from her pre- 
sent wretched social condition, is to be found in the 



THEORY AND RESULTS OF THE SYSTEM. 29 

introduction of the Scotch system of large farms, 
occupied by tenants of capital and skill giving em- 
ployment to the population as agricultural labourers. 
The legislature and many enlightened men in England 
entertain the same idea. The difficulty of getting 
rid of the small tenants who now fill the land, and 
are too numerous to be employed and absorbed in the 
large-farm system, is the only impediment and ob- 
stacle to its general adoption ; and yet, with singular 
inconsistency, those Irish landlords who are taking 
the most vigorous and effective measures for intro- 
ducing that system of large-farm occupancy on their 
estates, by ejecting and clearing their land of the 
small cottar tenants, are universally condemned, and 
held up to public reprobation, by those very persons, 
journalists and political economists, who approve and 
recommend the principle, and the introduction of 
large-farm occupancy, as the only salvation of Ire- 
land. This inconsistency shows that there must be 
something wrong in a theory which is so universally 
approved of in 'the abstract, yet so universally con- 
demned by the secret instinct of good sense and right 
feeling of the public mind, when the very first step is 
taken by any individual landlord in Ireland to bring 
the theory into practice on his estate. Let us look, 
then, a little into the theory and practical results of 
this system of agricultural improvement in Scotland, 
and examine more closely its true bearing on the 
social condition and well-being of the great mass of 
the population. What is its object ? What the 
means to obtain that object ? What the result ? 

The object is clear enough: it is to increase the 
quantity of the marketable produce of the land or 
farm which is in the course of being improved, and 



30 PEASANT-PKOPKIETORS AND PEASANT-TENANTS: 

thereby to increase its rent, and, at the same time, 
the profit to the rent-payer or farmer. 

Now for the means. There are two distinct means 
to attain this object, with totally distinct effects on 
the wealth and well-being of a nation, although prac- 
tical farmers, agricultural writers, and even political 
economists, generally blend the two together. The 
one is to give greater fertility to the soil, by more 
careful and skilful cultivation of it, and thus to in- 
crease the quantity of its marketable produce. This 
is unquestionably adding to the wealth of a nation — 
this improvement of its soil. The only mistake here 
is, that it is assumed, without proof, and without 
reference to the husbandry of other countries, that 
this improvement can only be effected by large capi- 
tals applied to large farms ; and that farms of from 
three or four hundred a-year of rent to a thousand or 
fifteen hundred a-year must, in the nature of things, 
be better farmed — better ploughed, drained, ma- 
nured, cleaned, and cultivated — than the same land 
would be in small farms held in property by small 
farmers. Now this assumption is not only not proved, 
but is directly contradicted by the garden-like culti- 
vation of all this country of Flanders, and of Belgium, 
Holland, Friesland, Holstein, and wheresoever small 
farms in the hands of a class of working peasant- 
proprietors cover the face of the land. It stands 
indeed to reason that no large farm (suppose one, for 
instance, of iive hundred acres) can, by dint of capital 
and hired labour, be made literally a garden in pro- 
ductiveness, in the cropping, cleaning, weeding, ma- 
nuring, and cultivation of it ; but the fi\e hundred 
acres could be made into a hundred gardens of five 
acres each, and each dug, raked, manured, weeded, 



THEIR HUSBANDRY, ETC., CONTRASTED. 31 

and cropped, by the family it supports, and each as 
productive as any kitchen garden or market garden, 
— a productiveness which no large farm ever can 
approach, because, as stated before, hired labour 
could not be applied to such minute cultivation of 
ordinary crops, and leave a surplus for rent and 
profits to a landlord and tenant, besides the hire and 
subsistence of the labourer. The wretched cultiva- 
tion of small tenant-farms in Ireland, and in Scotland 
before the small tenants were ejected, and the land 
brought into the large-farm occupancy, is generally 
adduced as proof undeniable that small farms are in- 
compatible with good husbandry, and with bringing 
the land of a country to its utmost productiveness 
and fertility. But it only proves that the tenure of 
a small farm held from year to year, or even for a 
term of years, at a heavy rent, and under services of 
time and labour to the landlord, tacksman, or mid- 
dleman, is essentially different from that of a small 
farm held in property by the farmer himself, and for 
which he has neither rent nor services to pay ; 
and that this difference is a bar to all industry or 
improvement by the class of small tenant farmers in 
Ireland or Scotland, because rent rising, in proportion 
to any improvement made, at the end of each lease or 
term of years, would swallow up all that industry 
might produce. The small tenant-farmer, in fact, 
would be only working against himself, and for the 
purpose of raising his own rent, and deteriorating his 
own condition at a future day by his industry and 
improvements. It only proves the essential differ- 
ence in the condition of the two classes of small 
peasant-proprietors and peasant-tenants ; and that the 
moral stimulus of giving his own time and labour to 



32 ECONOMY IN LABOUR 

the improvement of his own property, will make the 
peasant-proprietor cultivate and improve land which 
cannot afford rent and profit to a landlord and tenant, 
although it yields a subsistence, improving yearly, to 
himself as labourer ; and that the want of this moral 
stimulus of a property in his land and labour, makes 
the peasant-tenant, on the finest soils in Ireland and 
Scotland, slothful, ummproving, and starving. This 
essential difference is very strikingly brought out in 
Ireland and Flanders. The peasant-tenants of small 
farms in Ireland are sunk in misery. The peasant- 
proprietors in Flanders, on soil originally inferior, 
working on their own little farms on their own ac- 
count, from generation to generation, have brought 
them to a garden-like fertility and productiveness, 
and have made the whole face of the country a garden, 
and a pattern to Europe. Is there any reasonable 
ground for drawing a sweeping conclusion against the 
occupancy of a country by small peasant-proprietors, 
from the condition or husbandry of a class so entirely 
different in their circumstances, motives of action, 
and social position, as the small peasant-tenants of 
Ireland or Scotland ? 

The other means of increasing the quantity of mar- 
ketable produce of an improved farm, or one in the 
course of being improved on the Scotch system, is to 
consume less of the farm produce in raising it, and 
having, consequently, more of it to send to market. 
To economise labour, in short, is the main object of 
by far the greater part of what is called " agricultural 
improvement " in Scotland, or " the Scotch system of 
farming " in England. But in this kind of improve- 
ment, national wealth and well-being have no part, 
interest, or benefit whatsoever, unless the labour 



THE BASIS OF SCOTCH FARMING. 33 

superseded, or economised, can be beneficially em- 
ployed in some other branch of industry. If this 
labour be merely turned out to starve in the high 
roads or the streets, or to be maintained in the work- 
house, without employment, the advantage to the 
nation of such improvement is somewhat doubtful. 
The productiveness being the same, whether the quan- 
tity produced be consumed by the population em* 
ployed in producing it, or whether it be sent to the 
market-town to be sold, it feeds only the same number 
of mouths in different localities and occupations. It 
is but a class question. It is the same quantity of 
human food subsisting the same number of human 
beings. It would be necessary to prove, if this kind 
of agricultural improvement is held to be an augmen- 
tation of our national wealth, and well-being, that this 
number of people is employed more beneficially for 
themselves, and the country, in the towns — that is, in 
manufacturing industry — than in raising their own 
food, and ameliorating the soil of the country, by their 
labour ; and to prove that the real wealth, strength, 
and well-being of a nation are increased by this forced 
increase of manufacturing labourers in the population, 
and this forced diminution of the proportion of the 
population subsisted by agricultural labour. To the 
employers, both in manufactures and agriculture, it 
is, no doubt, an advantage : but what is it to the 
employed ? This saving of labour is the main branch 
of the Scotch system of agricultural improvement. 
It is the main element in the higher rents to the land- 
lord, and greater profits to the tenants: but to the 
great mass of the community, — to the labouring 
population, — what is its benefit? It is, in truth, but 
a class-advantage, — an advantage to the employers, 

D 



34 ECONOMY OF LABOUR 

in which the well-being of the employed has no share. 
Their labour, whether manufacturing or agricultural, 
is not more in demand, surely, by this economising 
of their labour in that greatest branch of human 
employment, the cultivation of the soil ; nor is their 
means of obtaining the food and necessaries of a 
civilised subsistence by their labour increased by this 
abridgment of the permanent employment and living 
of labourers on the land. The labourers dispensed 
with in husbandry, by this kind of improvement, are 
necessarily forced into the towns to seek a subsistence 
at any rate of wages that will keep body and soul 
together ; and this excess of the supply of labour 
forced into the labour-market, necessarily reduces 
the value of labour in manufacturing work, even in 
work of skill, below the standard of a civilised sub- 
sistence, and fosters over-production in every branch 
of manufacture, by the cheapness of the wages of the 
manufacturing operatives. The agricultural and manu- 
facturing capitalists play admirably into each other's 
hands, and talk and write admirably about wages 
being the value of labour in a free labour-market ; 
but which free labour-market is kept always full to 
excess, by forcing agricultural labour into it, and thus 
reducing wages to the lowest rate at which the human 
animal can exist. But of what benefit is this to any 
but landlords, and master-manufacturers ? Are the 
people better off for being driven from the land, and 
forced to seek a subsistence by labour in the towns, 
and factories, already over-supplied with labourers ; 
or is it only two classes of the community who are 
better off by it ? Is there any want of hands in any 
branch of manufacturing industry, that makes it a 
national gain to employ and subsist fewer by agricul- 



THE BASIS OF SCOTCH FARMING. 35 

tural, and more by manufacturing, labour ? Whether 
fully or profitably employed or not, the agricultural 
labourer earns his own subsistence, at least, by his 
own work, which the manufacturing labourer cannot 
always do. To subsist the labouring population of a 
country in an assured and civilised way, — not to 
turn their labour into a profit for their employers 
only, — is, or should be, the great aim of political 
economy. 

Scotland has now enjoyed, for more than half a 
century, this improving process ; and what is called 
the Scotch system of land-letting, and farming, has 
extended over the whole country. What has been 
the improvement, physical or moral, in the condition of 
the great mass of her population ? Kents of land, it 
is true, have doubled, trebled, quadrupled ; and the 
agricultural population being driven into the towns, 
— Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paisley, Greenock, Dundee, 
Aberdeen, — have doubled, trebled, quadrupled. The 
aggregate population of these six towns alone has 
risen, since 1801, from 262,274 souls, to 665,967 in 
1841. Are not these towns great social excrescences 
in a country with only 2,620,000 inhabitants ? In 
1841 it was reckoned that there were only 141,243 
families employed in agriculture, which, at four and 
a half persons for each family, would amount to an 
agricultural population, in all Scotland, of 636,093 
persons, or somewhat less than the population of six 
of her towns. Is this a sound and wholesome distri- 
bution of employment and population in a country ? 
Is it from want of land that so few families are sub- 
sisted by agricultural employment ? The total area 
of Scotland is estimated at 20,586,880 acres, of which 
9,039,930 are considered not susceptible of cultivation, 

D 2 



36 CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 

being lakes, mountain-tops, rocks, &c. ; and of the re- 
maining 11,546,950 acres, 5,485,000 acres are culti- 
vated, and 6,061,950 acres are uncultivated, the latter, 
however, yielding rent and profit, as sheep-farms^ shoot- 
ing-grounds, or deer- preserves, although not yielding 
employment and subsistence, as in former times, when 
the Highlands were a peopled country. There appears 
to be but one family employed in Scotland on eyery 
eighty-two acres of the land capable of cultivation, and 
only one employed for every thirty-nine acres of the 
actually cultivated land. The great question here be- 
longs to a higher science than political economy — to 
social philosophy. It is not whether more or better agri- 
cultural produce is sent to market by the one system 
than by the other, but whether it be a better social 
arrangement for the permanent well-being of a nation, 
that six hundred thousand only, of a population of 
two millions and a half, should be employed on the 
cultivation of the land of a country, and the rest of 
the mass of its working population be dependent, for 
the means to buy subsistence, on the manufacture 
and sale of cotton, iron, and other goods, for distant, 
foreign, and uncertain markets ; or whether it would 
be a better arrangement of society, that the land of 
the country should employ and subsist the mass of its 
inhabitants, and only the smaller proportion be alto- 
getherde pendent for employment, and food, on the sale, 
in the foreign or even in the home market, of the 
products of their work. 

If the moral and sanitary condition of a people be 
an element in their well-being as important as their 
mode of earning a subsistence, and very closely con- 
nected with it, the statistical facts illustrative of that 
condition are not favourable to the system which has 



IN THE TOWNS OF SCOTLAND. 37 

heaped up large masses of the population of Scotland 
into the towns. In 1841 the population of Scotland, 
2,620,184 persons, consumed 5,595,186 gallons of 
spirits, while the 14,995,138 persons of the English 
population consumed only one-third more, viz. 
7,956,054 gallons; and the 8,175,124 of Irish people 
consumed less than the two and a-half millions of 
Scotch people, viz. 5,200,650 gallons. In Edinburgh, 
in 1846, there were 986 houses licensed for the sale of 
spirits ; that is, of every thirty-one houses in Edin- 
burgh, one is a spirit- shop, and 434 of these are open 
on Sundays for the sale of spirits. In religious Edin- 
burgh, it was stated by one of the magistrates in the 
Town Council, the sum spent in Sunday- drinking in 
the course of the year amounts to 112,840/., or about 
2,170/. is spent on each of the fifty-two sabbaths of 
the year in drinking whisky or other spirits. Well 
done, religious Edinburgh ! Petition, by all means, 
against the desecration of the Sabbath-day in England 
by railway-travelling, and Post- Office work, for it is 
unquestionably a great social, moral, and religious 
evil — but pluck the beam out of your own eye! 
2,170/. sterling, spent in sabbath-day whisky-drinking, 
is the measure — the gauger's test — of the moral, 
sanitary, and religious condition of Edinburgh, every 
sabbath in the year ! And, in proportion to population, 
every town in Scotland is a facsimile of Edinburgh ! 
The social well-being produced by this improvement 
of driving the population from the land into the towns, 
appears somewhat doubtful in the face of such statis- 
tical facts ! It appears to be an improvement of the 
wealth of the few, at the cost of the well-being, morals, 
and health of the many ! 

During the process of Scotch improvements in 

D 3 



38 ECONOMY OF LABOUK 

agriculture, while inclosing, draining, and building 
are going on in an improving district, a temporary 
increase of employment is, no doubt, given to the 
labourers in it ; and this has been laid hold of in de- 
scribing the condition of some districts, as Sutherland- 
shire, and stated to the public as a vindication of the 
system of large-farm occupancy, and a proof that the 
agricultural population is not diminished by it. But 
the end and object of this temporary employment of 
labour is, to enable the farmer to do with as little 
labour afterwards as possible, to save labour, to keep 
and pay as few labourers on his farm as possible. 
Suppose the improving to be finished, the land in- 
closed, drained, farm-houses and offices built, and the 
estate let to tenants of capital and skill, and all in 
best East Lothian trim: suppose it is an estate of 
4000?. a year; this would be about 1600 acres of 
land, let on an average at fifty shillings per acre, and 
divided into eight farms of the average size of 200 
acres, and of the average rent of 500/. each. This is 
below, not above, the average size and rent of arable 
farms in the best and most improved districts of the 
south of Scotland. Now, the farmer of 200 acres will 
not keep so many as ten farm-servants all the year 
round, will he ? Four, and a boy and a girl, would 
perhaps be nearer the number. But at some seasons 
he will have more, and at other seasons fewer hands. 
Suppose he employs occasionally in the course of the 
year, as at harvest-time, turnip-hoeing, and such 
seasons, as much labour as might amount to the entire 
subsistence of ten hands all the year round, and then 
we have only eighty people kept on this estate of 4000/, 
a year ; and these mostly single wandering men or 
girls, without any property but their half-year's fee as 



THE BASIS OF SCOTCH FARMING. 39 

farm-servants, and without house or home, but shift- 
ing from one farmer's bothy to another every half- 
year, and living in these bothys with less of domestic 
habits, ties, or comforts, than the farmers' pigs. 

Now take under your eye a space of land here in 
Flanders, that you judge to be about 1600 acres. 
Walk over it, examine it ; every foot of the land is 
cultivated, dug with the spade or hoe, where horse and 
plough cannot work, and all is in crop, or in pre- 
paration for crop. In our best-farmed districts, 
there are corners and patches in every field, lying 
waste and uncultivated, because the large rent-paying 
farmer cannot afford hired labour, superintendence, 
and manure, to such minute portions of land, and 
garden-like work, as the owner of a small piece of 
land can bestow on every corner and spot of his own 
property. Here the whole 1600 acres must be in 
garden-farms of five or six acres ; and it is evident 
that in the amount of produce from the land, in the 
crops of rye, wheat, barley, rape, clover, lucerne, and 
flax for clothing material, which are the usual crops, 
the 1600 acres, under such garden-culture, surpass 
the 1600 acres under large-farm cultivation, however 
good, as much as a kitchen-garden surpasses in pro- 
ductiveness a common field. On the 1600 acres here 
in Flanders, or Belgium, instead of eight farmers 
with their eighty farm- servants, there will be from 
300 to 320 families, or from 1400 to 1600 individuals, 
each family working its own piece of land, and with 
some property in cows, sheep, pigs, utensils, and other 
stock in proportion to their land, and with constant 
employment and a secure subsistence on their own 
little estates. This is surely a happier social con- 
dition than that of the population of Scotland with 

D 4 



40 ECONOMY OF LABOUR IN SCOTLAND. 

its five or six thousand great landowners, its flou- 
rishing large farmers, its wealthy master manufactu- 
rers, its thriving merchants, agents, lawyers, bankers, 
— and all the population, whether connected or not 
connected with land, below those few thousands of 
individuals, earning a scanty and precarious sub- 
sistence, and always on the verge of destitution, and 
misery. It is not that a duke has 50,000/. a year, 
but that a thousand fathers of families have 50/. a 
year, that is true national wealth and well-being. 



EFFECTS OF SMALL ESTATES. 41 



CHAP. III. 

NOTES OK THE theory of population and food INCREASING in 

DIFFERENT RATIOS. — THE RELATIVE INCREASE OF POPULATION 
AND FOOD STATED DIFFERENTLY. LAND TO PRODUCE FOOD ARTI- 
FICIALLY, NOT NATURALLY, SCARCE FOR THE SUBSISTENCE OF ITS 
POPULATION. OVER-POPULATION ONLY RELATIVE TO UNDER-PRO- 
DUCTION FROM CONVENTIONAL CAUSES. ON THE OVER-POPULATION 

OF IRELAND ON THE SIZE OF FARMS IN IRELAND. — ON THE 

IMPRACTICABILITY OF CONVERTING THE SMALL IRISH FARMS INTO 
FARMS OF A SIZE FOR SCOTCH FARMING. ON THE REMEDIES PRO- 
POSED FOR THE OVER-POPULATION OF IRELAND. ON FISHERIES. 

ON FACTORIES ON EMIGRATION. 

Is there not great clanger, in the small-estate occu- 
pancy of the land of a country, that population will 
rapidly outgrow subsistence, that the land will be 
divided and sub-divided by each succeeding genera- 
tion of the small peasant-proprietors, until, at last, 
it will be frittered down, like the con-acres of the 
Irish cotters, into portions too small to subsist the 
population in a civilised way ? What are the pre- 
ventive checks which hinder, in such a social state, 
Flanders, Switzerland, Norway, or the many districts 
of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, in which the land 
has, from the most remote times, been in the hands 
of small working-proprietors, from presenting at the 
present day a counterpart of the present social state of 
Ireland ? These are questions requiring a long, and 
perhaps tedious, discussion to answer — but they are 
very important. 

Political economists tell us that population increases 



42 INCREASE OF POPULATION 

faster than food ; that the population of a country 
increases in the ratio of a geometrical progression, 
doubling itself at certain times in a series of years, 
while their food increases only in the ratio of an 
arithmetical progression. The one goes on as 2, 4, 
8, 16, 32, 64 ; the other only as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, in 
the same series of years. The idea of the different 
ratios by which population and food increase, was 
originally thrown out by Voltaire, and was picked up 
and expanded into many a goodly volume by our 
English political economists, in the present century. 
It is so universally received as a great fundamental 
truth, a law of nature, discovered by Malthus, and 
has been so fully examined and discussed by the 
ablest men of the age, that it would be great pre- 
sumption to doubt the truth of this theory of the 
different ratios of the increase of population and 
subsistence. Yet, somehow, this great truth has not 
been got at in a way satisfactory to common minds. 
Without presuming to doubt the truth of a theory 
so universally received, or the correctness of the 
result, I will venture to explain why the way of 
getting at it is not adapted to ordinary reason ers. 
When we compare two things together we must begin, 
in strict reasoning and correct statement, with 
reducing both to a common term ; to a common 
weight, for example, if it be their bulks we are com- 
paring ; or to a common bulk, if it be their weights. 
This is the usual process in the vulgar mind, and 
even in the philosophic ; and in chemistry, and the 
physical sciences, as well as the mathematical. Now, 
without presuming to question the reasoning of 
Voltaire — and still less of Malthus, and the many 
able political economists who have adopted the idea 



AND OF FOOD COMPARED. 43 

of Voltaire, and made it their own — I would venture 
to point out that, in arriving at this truth, they have 
not followed this strict and vulgar, but only accurate, 
process in reasoning. They do not bring the two 
things they are comparing — the increase of popula- 
tion, and the increase of food, in a given period — to 
a common term. They do not take the increase of 
population (for example, and to explain my meaning) 
in one year, which at its most rapid rate, and when 
it is doubling itself every 20 years, is but five per 
cent, of increase each year, — and compare that with 
the increase of subsistence from the crop of one year, 
which, at its lowest rate of increase, that is, with the 
worst husbandry, seasons, and crops, will always be 
three returns and the seed upon an average over a 
whole country, or 300 per cent. They take the 
accumulation of population in 20 years, and compare 
that with the increase of one year's crop above the 
amount of the preceding year's crop — of the twentieth 
year's crop above the nineteenth year's crop only. 
The two things to be compared — the progress of the 
production of subsistence, and that of the production 
of population — are not reduced here to a common 
term of 20 years, but only one of the two things is 
brought to that term. To state the question accu- 
rately, we should, I conceive, take an unit of population 
increasing at its most rapid rate, that is, doubling itself 
every 20 years. This average unit becomes two in 
20 years ; there are two units to subsist where there 
was but one, twenty years before. This is the amount 
of the accumulation of population at the end of this 
period ; and it is represented by this unit. Now, 
suppose this representative unit consumes each year 
five quarters of grain, and that this quantity, which re- 



44 INCREASE OF POPULATION 

presents the food or subsistence of this unit, was sown 
the first year of this series of 20 years, and each year 
of the 20 thereafter, and that the crops averaged three 
returns besides the seed and this unit's five quarters of 
yearly subsistence. The amount of this accumulation 
of subsistence in the course of twenty years, from 
the five bolls representing the unit, would, in a strict 
and correct statement of the question, be the increase 
on the food side of it, to be compared with the increase 
of population from the unit in the same space of 20 
years on the population side of it. The increase of 
population, in the series or term of the 20 years, is 
1 plus 1. The population, or number of its units, 
is doubled. The increase of subsistence from the five 
quarters of grain representing this unit on the food 
side of the question, would, at the end of the series 
of 20 years, be some trifle more than twenty-six 
thousand one hundred and fifty millions of quar- 
ters of grain, after deducting yearly the five quarters 
for the unit's subsistence, and the seed for each crop. 
But grain is perishable. Land and labour cannot be 
applied to the production of more of the perishable 
articles of subsistence than what can be required for 
consumption before a new crop gives a new supply. 
True. But the question is not whether grain, and other 
articles of human food, be perishable, or the land capa- 
ble of producing those articles be more or less scarce in 
any particular district or country, — but whether, as 
an abstract proposition in social philosophy, it is or is 
not a law of nature, that population, per se, has in it 
an element of increase more rapid than subsistence 
per se. In the human food derived from the vegetable 
productions of the earth, in a given period of twenty 
years, the excess of the production of subsistence over 



AXD OF FOOD COMPARED. 45 

the production of population seems almost incalcu- 
lable. In America, where land is not scarce, this 
excess is evident, although population increases there 
so rapidly. In Africa, where the surplus grain of 
each crop is preserved, it is said, in granaries dug in 
the sands, — and in the cold regions in the north of 
Europe, where, owing to the early frosts, one full crop 
out of seven is all that can be reckoned on, — the excess 
of the production of food, over the production of popu- 
lation, is proved by the surplus of food produced from 
one average crop being reserved for a succession of 
seven years of no crops. It seems indeed, a priori, a 
common-sense arrangement of Divine Providence, that 
the natural increase of subsistence should exceed the 
natural increase of population ; and the reverse would 
be contrary to what human reason might expect from 
the Divine wisdom and goodness, and the beneficent 
operations of Providence in all other laws of nature 
affecting human existence. True it is, that land, to 
produce subsistence, may be scarce in proportion to 
the population of some particular district or country ; 
but that is a totally different question from that of 
the natural ratios of increase of subsistence and po- 
pulation. Land may be artificially scarce, or deficient 
in giving subsistence, in many countries, and not 
naturally so. It may be scarce from a faulty distri- 
bution of it through the social body, or it may be 
deficient from bad cultivation, or from total neglect 
of cultivation; but from these artificial or fortuitous 
causes of subsistence not keeping pace with population, 
it is not sound reasoning to deduce a law of nature. 
Xo region of the earth is peopled up to its Ml 
capability of subsisting man, where no conventional 
obstacles oppose production. Lapland within, and 



46 INCREASE OF POPULATION 

adjacent to, the Polar Circle, affords a striking in- 
stance of this truth in social economics. According 
to a Keport of Count Douglas to the Swedish Govern- 
ment, upon the population of one district in that 
region, only three families were subsisted in it by 
agricultural labour in 1696. The rest of the popu- 
lation consisted of Laplanders wandering with their 
herds of reindeer in the hills. In 1766 the number 
of settled agricultural families had increased to 330, 
or 1650 individuals; and in 1799 the number in that 
district, subsisting by agriculture, was 6,049 families, 
and without diminution of the Lapland population, or 
their means of subsistence. Such is the capability of 
the earth, even in the polar regions, to produce sub- 
sistence for any natural increase of population. It is 
only a forced or artificially produced increase of 
population, for which subsistence may be deficient. 
The invasion of an army, the influx of immigrants 
into any small locality, the rapid establishment of 
manufactures for the supply of foreign markets, the 
rapid increase of town-populations by forcing labour 
from earning a living in husbandry, to employment 
or starvation in factories dependent on extraneous or 
casual demand, may produce such an artificial increase 
of population beyond the means of subsistence ; and 
the faulty distribution and use of the land may, as in 
Ireland, curtail the natural means of the country to 
subsist its population. But such effects of a highly 
artificial state of society, and landed property, in 
Scotland, England, and Ireland, do not entitle the 
political economist to deduce from them a law of 
nature, and to lay down as an axiom in social philo- 
sophy, that population increases more rapidly than 
subsistence, and that the two would not naturally 



AND OF FOOD COMPARED. 47 

keep pace with each other if left to their own action, 
and not disturbed in their proportional increase re- 
latively to each other, by the intervention of casual 
and conventional elements encouraging population, 
and restricting subsistence from the land. In Scot- 
land, it is estimated that more than one half of the 
land susceptible of cultivation is not cultivated ; that 
of the 11^- millions of acres capable of cultivation, 
5^- millions only are cultivated, and 6 millions are not 
cultivated. And why is this larger half not culti- 
vated in a country of which the agricultural system 
and agricultural improvements are held up as a 
model? Simply because it would not repay the 
expense of inclosing, draining, building houses and 
offices, and bringing it into the state of rent-paying 
arable land. It is not of a quality to afford a rent 
to a landlord, profit to a tenant for his capital and 
skill, and to replace the outlay of money in its im- 
provement, within any period of a lease. Yet such 
land would subsist a population of small proprietors 
working and living upon it. Having neither rent to 
a landlord, nor profit over and above their subsistence, 
to produce, they would earn a subsistence, poor and 
scanty no doubt at first, but gradually improving 
and increasing with the improvement of the soil by 
their labour on it. This uncultivated land could 
employ and subsist as great a body of agricultural 
labourers, if they were the owners of the land, as all 
the agricultural labourers employed and subsisted by 
the other half that is at present cultivated, and paying 
rent. In England, as in Scotland, as much land in 
every rural parish is lying useless, in wastes, commons, 
neglected patches, lanes not required, corners of fields, 
sides of roads, and such uncultivated spots, as would 



48 INCREASE OF POPULATION AND OE FOOD. 

keep and endow all the poor of the parish. Of the 
cultivated land of England, how much is producing 
little or no employment or subsistence for the popu- 
lation, but is merely under crops of luxury, such as 
hay and pasture for the pleasure-horses of the upper 
classes ? how much is laid out in parks, lawns, and 
old grass fields pastured over by cattle, horses, and 
sheep, roaming at large, and returning no manure of 
any value to the farmer for their food ? and how 
much arable land, for the want of that very manure, 
is in naked fallow, bearing no crop, but resting, as it 
is called, that is, exhausted, and waiting for its turn 
to receive manure ? Over-population is only relative 
to under-production, consequent on these artificial or 
conventional circumstances in the use and distribution 
of land. There is no natural disproportion between 
the increase of population, and of food for that popu- 
lation, independent of the fortuitous and artificial 
circumstances increasing the one, and diminishing the 
other. They would always be in equilibrium with 
each other, but for such circumstances. 

But Ireland ! Is not Ireland a pregnant example 
before our eyes, of the evils of the small-farm sys- 
tem of occupancy ? Is not the land there divided 
and subdivided by each succeeding generation of 
small farmers, or cotter occupants, until it is frittered 
down into portions too small to afford a civilised sub- 
sistence to the agricultural population ; in short, into 
mere potato-rigs ? Let us look a little at the case of 
Ireland. 

According to a statement made by Lord Mount- 
cashel at a public meeting at Cork in 1847, — and 
apparently derived from the official reports made to 



SIZE OF FARMS IN IRELAND. 49 

Government, — Ireland contains about 690,000 farms, 
of which 310,000 are under 5 acres of land each, and 
252,000 are between 15 and 30 acres. These are all 
of the class of small farms, and the farmer on each 
of these 562,000 small farms will not have less, on 
an average, than five persons in his family, or on his 
land as his sub-tenants. There is consequently a 
population of nearly three millions in Ireland living 
on small farms, or farms altogether incompatible with 
the large-farm system of land occupancy, being under 
30 acres each in extent. Taking the average size of 
these small farms even at 17 acres each, they would, 
at the minimum size of farms on the Scotch farm 
system of 120 acres (below which extent farm offices, 
houses, inclosures, and working stock, implements, 
and skill, could not be afforded), form, if thrown 
together, 79,616 farms, on which, after the improve- 
ment was finished, and the houses and inclosures 
built, ten labourers on each could not certainly be 
employed, and subsisted all the year round by agri- 
cultural work, and leave a surplus of produce for 
rent and profit. Suppose, however, ten labourers in 
husbandry were employed and subsisted on each farm 
of 120 acres, on the large-farm Scotch system, that 
would only take up about 800,000 of the Irish popu- 
lation. What is to become of the remaining two 
millions, or two and a half millions, now existing, or 
rather famishing, on the same arable area ? To 
attempt a change of system in the land occupancy of 
Ireland by means of emigration, or of town and 
factory employment, or of fisheries, or by any of those 
homoeopathic remedies proposed for the cure of this 
great social disease, would be both dangerous and 
impracticable. 

E 



50 IRISH FISHERIES. 

Fisheries require capital, and markets for the fish ; 
the outfit of four fishermen with a boat, nets, lines, 
and other necessaries, costs from 80/. to 120/., and 
the greater part must be renewed in three years. 
To fish for food, not for sale, is altogether visionary 
in sea fisheries ; there is a capital to be replaced. 
Where in Ireland are the consumers with ready 
money to take off the fish at remunerating prices, 
and replace the capital invested in boats, nets, sails, 
and other perishable articles ? The philanthropists 
who talk of the fisheries on the coast of Ireland as a 
means of employing and absorbing a large proportion, 
or any proportion, of the pauper unemployed Irish, 
seem not aware that few trades, or occupations of 
common labour, require so much capital to begin 
with, and so much co-operative industry to carry 
them on, as that of the regular fisherman. The 
blacksmith, carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, or small 
farmer, requires but a trifling sum to set him up with 
the tools and materials of his handicraft, compared 
to the fisherman, who, at the very outset, must have 
a boat, nets, lines, and other equipment, to the value 
of from 80/. to 120/., — must have the co-operative 
labour of four, or perhaps live, men on wages, or as 
partners, to move his tools of trade, — and must, in the 
cod or herring fishery, have behind him another class 
of capitalists, the fish-curers, with from 200/. to 300/. 
for each boat in their service, to buy, cure, barrel, 
and send to market the fish caught. A thousand 
open boats, fully equipped and provided for the 
herring fishery, implies a capital of 300,000/., more 
than half of which is invested in perishable materials, 
such as nets, lines, sails, barrels ; and the most costly 
of which, the nets, sails, lines, will last with care only 



IRISH FISHERIES. 51 

three years, and may be rendered useless in a few 
hours by neglect or inexperience. And this capital 
would only employ 5000 fishermen, and about half as 
many people on shore, and only for six weeks of the 
herring-fishing season. A class of regular fishermen, 
living entirely by their trade, belongs, in fact, to a 
very advanced state of society in which there are 
many combinations of capital and labour, and not at 
all to an incipient state of civilisation like that of 
Ireland. They presuppose the existence of numerous 
artisans, manufacturers, and tradesmen, earning more 
than a mere living upon the cheapest products of the 
soil, and affording a ready market, at remunerating 
prices, for the kind of food the fishermen produce. 
They are about the last, and not the first, called into 
employment in the natural progress of society. From 
Dover to Thurso, either round the east coast of 
Great Britain or the west, the number of fishermen 
employed will be found to correspond, not to their 
proximity to fishing banks in the sea, but to the 
markets in the country behind them. It is the 
Thames that sends out the most numerous, most ex- 
pert, and best- equipped body of fishermen to the 
North Sea. The Tyne, the Frith of Forth, the Tay, 
and coast-side north to the Pentland Frith, support 
regular fishermen living by their trade, exactly in 
proportion to the markets behind them. In the 
northern counties, where there are no minerals or 
manufactures, and only an agricultural population, 
few or no regular fishermen are supported, although 
London fishermen ply their trade within hail of their 
cottages : there is no market on shore to sustain them. 
The herring fishery is but a lottery, in which a man 
may earn a twelvemonth's subsistence by six weeks' 

E 2 



52 IEISH FISHERIES. 

work. They who engage in it in the northern counties 
of Scotland, depend for subsistence on their farms, 
not on their fishing; and are neither good farmers, 
nor expert fishermen. It is a demoralising employ- 
ment, like all other games or lotteries of chance, and 
the least suited of any to the Irish temperament. If 
the philanthropists who talk of subsisting the unem- 
ployed Irish population in the neglected fisheries on 
the Irish coast, mean that each family is to fish for 
its own food, to sit on the rocks, or in the stern of a 
punt a few yards from the shore, with a stick, a 
string, and a crooked pin, and pull up a diet of small 
fry in the course of the day, to appease their hunger, 
the advantage of this kind of national fishery for pro- 
moting the industry, civilisation, and well-being of 
the Irish people, above the present dependence on the 
lazy bed of potatoes for the year's food of the family, 
is not very apparent. The indigent cotter peasantry 
are better off as they are ; for uncertain as the potato 
crop may be, it is more certain than wind, weather, 
and fish to trust to for daily food. The Esquimaux, 
the people of Terra del Fuego, and even the inha- 
bitants of some of the remote islands on the west and 
north coasts of Scotland, exhibit the kind of well- 
being and civilisation of a people who fish for their 
own food, without markets, or exchange of the pro- 
ducts of their industry as fishermen, for those of 
others. The Irish economists must begin with raising 
a thriving middle class of tradesmen, manufacturers, 
and others, who can afford to buy and consume fish, 
before sending the population to sea to catch fish. 
It is only where employment in various branches of 
industry is abundant, and pretty well paid, and em- 
ployers and employed are in general in a thriving 



IRISH EMIGRATION. 53 

condition, that a regular market for fish produces a 
regular class of fisher men earning a civilised sub- 
sistence by their trade. A labouring population 
earning sixpence or eightpence a day, cannot afford 
to buy fish at a price to support a class of fishermen ; 
the loom must be going, and the hammer ringing on 
the anvil, before the fishing-boat can be launched. 

Factory employment must precede fishery employ- 
ment ; but in Ireland it has to struggle against such 
difficulties, that any considerable prosperity, giving 
work and wages, as in England and Scotland, to large 
masses and proportions of the total population, can 
scarcely be expected. Want of capital, want of security 
for capital, want of minerals and of fire-power, want 
of habits of steady industry and thrift in the people, 
want of a body of consumers at home, and of a home 
market, the pre-occupation of all foreign markets by 
manufacturers, English, German, Belgian, of great 
skill and capital, and who are in possession of every 
branch of industry, are obstacles to any very great 
increase of manufacturing employment and industry 
in Ireland. She comes too late into the field. 

But if neither fisheries nor factories can absorb the 
overflowing population of Ireland ; if their utmost 
success would only be the addition of two classes 
more to the social body, with all their own pauperism 
and misery, without any diminution of the numbers 
of the main body, and its own quota of pauperism 
and misery ; where is relief to be found ? Is it not 
in emigration — in a comprehensive system of emi- 
gration — with government aid ? Should not the 
British fleet, and the public revenues, be applied to 
the conveyance of the surplus population of Ireland 
to Canada, the Cape, and Australia ? The question 



54 EMIGEATION. 

is so generally answered in the affirmative, that any 
objections are scarcely listened to with patience : yet 
we must admit that Ireland has enjoyed for five-and- 
twenty years an emigration to England and Scotland, 
by steam navigation, far exceeding the numbers that 
the British navy and the public revenue could trans- 
port every year to Canada ; and that, notwithstanding 
this drain from the Irish population, going on night 
and day across the channel, at the cheapest rate at 
which passengers can be carried, the diminution of 
the Irish population remaining behind is not percep- 
tible. The population is even increasing in Ireland, 
as if no such drain as emigration to England and 
Scotland existed. This fact must make men of any 
reflection pause. Our cities filled with Irish emi- 
grants — one-fourth of the total population of Glas- 
gow, Edinburgh, Dundee, and other great cities, Irish 
— yet Ireland still overflowing ! There must be 
some flaw in this generally received opinion, that the 
social disease of over-population (whether produced 
by conventional causes of under-production of food, 
or of want of employment in a country in proportion 
to its population, or by a law of nature giving different 
ratios of increase to food and to population) is one 
that may be cured or alleviated by emigration to our 
over-sea colonies. 



EMIGRATION BY SEA. 55 



CHAP. IV. 

NOTES OX EMIGRATIOX. EMIGRATION BY SEA NO REMEDY FOR OVER- 
POPULATION. — EMIGRATION OF SMALL CAPITALISTS NO RELIEF TO 
THE COUNTRY. — EXPENSE AND LXEFFICIEXCY OF EMIGRATION AT 

THE PUBLIC EXPEXSE. — ITS IXJUSTICE. REASONS WHY A POOR 

MAN SHOULD NOT EMIGRATE — WHY A MAN WITH A LITTLE 
SAVED CAPITAL SHOULD NOT EMIGRATE. THE ENGLISH TOO CO- 
OPERATIVE, AND TOO FAR ADVANCED LN CIVILISATION, TO 

EMIGRATE WITH ADVANTAGE. — E3nGRATIOX FROM GERMANY. 

LETTERS OF EXPATRIATIOX. 

If we had only to remove, bag and baggage, a few 
hundred miles by land, as the citizens of America do 
now, as the Israelites did of old, or as the tribes who 
overwhelmed the Roman empire did fifteen hundred 
years ago, carrying wives, children, cattle, goods, and 
all that is moveable, along with the family- waggons, 
until we come to a land that appears suitable to settle 
in, the mother-country would no doubt be relieved of 
some of the most active and restless, if not of its 
poorest and most useless, population. But if we con- 
sider all that necessarily enters into a great over- sea 
emigration, either at the expense of government, or 
of the individuals emi^ratin^, we shall find that 
this disease of over-population is aggravated, not re- 
lieved, and far less healed, by this water-cure remedy, 
and that emigration by sea actually increases the very 
evil it proposes to remove. For every thirty families 
who emigrate by sea from Britain, twice thirty young 
men and young women are, by the direct effects and 
immediate consequences of this emigration, brought 

E 4 



56 EMIGRATION INCREASES POPULATION. 

into the married state ; that is, are placed in a tem- 
porary condition of full employment, full wages, and 
full well-being, for their station in life ; and which 
condition naturally and certainly leads them into 
marriage and families, and ultimately, and at no very 
distant interval of time, into that very state of pau- 
perism, and of falling back upon poor-rates for a 
subsistence, which it is the object of emigration- en- 
couragement to prevent. Let us place the practical 
working of this Morrison's pill for the cure of over- 
population, fairly before our eyes. Suppose thirty 
families, or a hundred and fifty individuals — a ship- 
ful, in short, of emigrants — embarked for America or 
Australia. Suppose them fitted out with the very 
smallest allowance of food, clothes, bedding, utensils, 
tools, and other necessaries of life, that they can exist 
with, until their own labour and land begin to sup- 
port them. If they are not to perish in the forest, 
they must be provided, at the least, with a stock of 
all things needful for eighteen months; because, if 
they go only to Canada, or to the nearest of our 
American provinces, they arrive too late in the spring 
to build a habitation, provide fuel, clear land, and sow 
a crop to be reaped in autumn, in the same year of their 
departure from the mother country. The seasons 
are too hasty in America for emigrants to overtake 
a spring seed-time, after a spring voyage across the 
Atlantic. A year and a halfs stock, therefore, of all 
things must be laid in at once, within a week or two 
of the vessel's sailing ; that is to say, the expenditure 
for all kinds of needful articles which would have 
been spread over a year, or a year and a half, of their 
existence, but for the emigration of these one hundred 
and fifty individuals, is thrown at once into two or 



EMIGRATION INCREASES POPULATION. 57 

three weeks, — thus giving a false stimulus at home 
in this country, as far as their outfit and expenditure 
goes, to every branch of manufacturing industry con- 
nected with the articles they take with them; and 
giving thus a false stimulus to population at home, in 
all those branches of employment. The stimulus is 
false, because it is no real and permanent increase of 
consumption, but only a false appearance of an in- 
creased consumption, from a year and a half's de- 
mand being squeezed into a month's, and thrown at 
once into the market. In the outfit of one hundred 
and fifty individuals this may be a trifle; but in the 
outfit of half a million of emigrants yearly — and less 
would be no effective diminution of the yearly increase 
of our population — this stimulus to population by 
great but temporary employment at home, in all 
trades connected with their outfit, creates the very 
evil it is proposed to cure. Now, take the vessel that 
is to convey the thirty families, or one hundred and 
fifty individuals, into consideration : reckon up, if 
you can, the carpenters, smiths, sail-makers, rope- 
makers, sailcloth-weavers, riggers, founders, coopers, 
chandlers, bakers, butchers, bankers, merchants, 
clerks, labourers, seamen, and all the ten thousand 
and ten trades and ramifications of industry, set 
agoing, and for a short time beneficially, profitably, 
and thus with a bounty, as one may say, for those so 
employed entering into matrimony, from the mere 
additional employment given by the outfit of this 
vessel alone, and of her cargo of one hundred and fifty 
individuals, — and tell me if the exportation of the 
thirty families, the vacuum they leave, be not over- 
balanced and filled up, by the stimulus given to mar- 
riage and population at home, by "the breeding in all 



58 EMIGRATION, 

its branches " encouraged and set agoing by this very 
remedy for over-population? The families, too, you 
export are necessarily people of some small capital of 
their own ; or, at least, with health, strength, and 
capability' of work, in them — the very class you do 
not want to get rid of; and the people you keep at 
home are the paupers, the infirm, decrepid, sickly, the 
infants, the aged, and the mass of operatives unfit fo 
any kind of work but the one particular branch of 
manufacture they have been bred to in the factory, 
and which is overstocked with labour — the very class 
you want to get rid of by emigration, although the 
least adapted of any class to earn a living, as emi- 
grants, by field labour. Keep down the redundancy 
of population by encouraging emigration ! Reverse 
the proposition — promote excess of population by 
encouraging emigration, by giving population the 
stimulus of emigration-employment, and you come 
nearer to the true practical working, upon our home 
population, of any emigration or colonisation scheme, 
on a great scale, with government aid. The rising 
flood of population is not to be kept down by the 
teacupful drainage of ship-emigration. We might as 
well try to bale out the North Sea into the Atlantic, 
by sending all the milkmaids in England to dip their 
pails into the ocean at Flamborough Head and empty 
them into Plymouth Sound. 

The population of Great Britain, according to the 
ten-yearly census of the last twenty years, seems to 
be increasing steadily at the rate of nearly 1^ per 
cent, each year.* The population of the United 

* In 1821, the population of the three kingdoms was 21,193,000 
In 1841, the population was - 26,916,000 

The increase in these 20 years is - 5,723,000. 



AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE. 59 

Kingdoms in 1849 being taken in round numbers at 
about 28,000,000, we are adding 420,000 people every 
year to it. The utmost amount of emigration was in 
the famine year of 1848, when it is reckoned to have 
been about 270,000 persons* ; that is, about two-thirds 
of the numbers yearly added, on an average, to our 
population. This would not do. It would not even 
keep our population stationary in numbers ; yet 1848 
was a year in which famine in Ireland, and want of 
employment in all branches of manufacturing in- 
dustry in England and Scotland, gave the utmost 
stimulus to emigration by private means. Suppose 
government were to give the means, and to ship off 
some 50,000 emigrants every year to Canada at the 
public expense. Without stopping to inquire whether 
emigration at private expense, to the extent of 270,000 
persons, would take place, in ordinary years, if emi- 
gration at public expense to the extent pf 50,000 
persons was in competition with it, let us look at the 
effect and working of such a government measure. 
It is a favourite scheme with country gentlemen both 
in England and Ireland, is often recommended in 
Parliament, and well deserves consideration. All 
British America contains little more than 1^ million 
of inhabitants ; and of these the greater part by far 
are labouring husbandmen, themselves working upon 
their own lots of land. The demand for ordinary 
labour in such a population could not take up 50,000 
labourers every year, in addition to their own labour, 
and subsist them. The majority of the inhabitants 
subsist themselves by their own labour on the land, 

* From 1842 to 1848, seven years, the total emigration was 985, 9o3, 
or only 140,850 persons yearly, on an average : so that 270,000 emigrants 
is probably an exaggerated estimate. 



60 EMIGKATION OF PAUPERS. 

and have no subsistence and wages to spare for hired 
agricultural labourers whom they do not require. 
The 50,000 emigrants, therefore, must necessarily get 
land, seed, tools, stock, lodging, and food, until they 
raise crops by their own labour for their own sub- 
sistence. But on the great scale, and even in the 
case of a single family of emigrants, this crop -raising 
for their own subsistence could not be accomplished 
in less than eighteen months from the date of their 
embarkation from England ; and, for that time, the 
first 50,000 must necessarily be upon the hands of 
government, for food, fuel, lodging, and all necessary 
subsistence. Taking into account their food, freight, 
tools, bedding, clothing, seed, and farm-stock, — all of 
which must be provided, if the emigrants are of that 
class whom it is desirable to get rid of, viz., able- 
bodied, but unemployed, people without capital, who 
are either^ paupers, or verging on pauperism, but who 
could earn their subsistence by work if they had 
work, — the expense of 50,000 such emigrants for 
subsistence, and outfit, would be little less than the 
expense of 50,000 foot soldiers for eighteen months. 
In any regular scheme of yearly emigration at the 
public expense, and under government arrangement, 
a second body of 50,000 emigrants succeeding the 
first body, must necessarily be afloat, and drawing sub- 
sistence from government, before the first 50,000 could 
by any possibility have reaped a crop to subsist them- 
selves. Nay, a third 50,000 must be on the way, and 
living on government rations, before the first 50,000 
could be altogether independent of such aid, and sub- 
sisting from their own crops. Now, to what end would 
the expense to the country be incurred in feeding, 
transporting, and settling, in the uncleared land of 



EMIGRATION OE SMALL CAPITALISTS. 61 

Canada, this army of 150,000 emigrants in the course 
of three years ? The increase of our population in 
that period would, at its present rate, be 1,260,000 
souls; and the diminution, by government emigration 
aid, would be 150,000! — a drop, a mere drop, out 
of a bucket. And yet what would that drop cost ? 
Compared with such an annual levy of 50,000 emi- 
grants, with their fleet of transports, their commis- 
sariat, medical staff, and other indispensable establish- 
ments, the crusades of the eleventh century were 
rational and cheap expeditions for getting rid of 
over-population. But the emigration scheme under 
government aid and management proposes, it will be 
said, no such expensive arrangements. A free, or a 
cheap, passage to America, is all that it is intended 
government should give ; and the emigrants must 
provide themselves with land, seed, tools, clothing, 
and, from the moment they set foot in America, must 
subsist themselves. But to do this the emigrants 
government sends away at the public expense, must 
be of the class of small capitalists, the very class we 
do not want to get rid of; the very class of whom we 
have too few, not too many, for they are the class 
who employ and support the great mass of the half- 
poor, and the partly infirm and worn-out. The odd 
jobs and occasional work, about the houses and work- 
shops of this class, exceed, in the amount of sub- 
sistence given, all the regular employment in our 
great factories. Every family in this class has its 
poor neighbour helping, cleaning, working, and earn- 
ing victuals, or money, for work ; and this class is the 
great stay and support of the poor, who, from ill- 
health, or old age, cannot earn full wages, or do a full 
day's work. They are the barrier against an over- 



62 EMIGRATION OF SMALL CAPITALISTS. 

whelming pauperism in England and Scotland. Sweep 
the country clean of this class, and you would have 
nothing left in it but lords, lairds, great capitalists, 
merchants, and manufacturers on a great scale ; and 
all below them a mass of sheer paupers, ready for 
tumult, and the most wild outrages upon property ; 
and without a class just above them, and in contact 
with them, who have property, however small, to 
defend, and are as able and as ready to support, as 
the turbulent to overthrow, the established order of 
society. Besides, people with means of their own to 
provide land, seed, implements, farm-stock, clothing, 
and food to subsist on until a crop is produced, are 
not paupers ; and to give them a free passage to 
Canada at the expense of other people — that is, out 
of the taxes of the country — would be a monstrous 
injustice to other people, since they can afford to pay 
for their passage themselves. But to give the actual 
able-bodied pauper, the willing working-man in a state 
of destitution, a free passage to Canada, without giving 
him work there, or means to earn a subsistence by his 
work on a lot of land of his own, to set him on the 
shore with a biscuit in his pocket, would be a mere 
political- economy murder. In a country in which all 
the husbandmen are labourers themselves, the com- 
mon labourer in husbandry is not required, unless 
perhaps by a new and speculative farmer here and 
there. The surplus of crop on the small spaces cleared 
for cultivation, and its value at market, do not afford 
wages to hired labourers for prospective improve- 
ments. The wages expended in clearing a piece of 
land by hired labour, cannot be replaced by the pro- 
duce of that land in less than three years ; and the 
prudent settlers, therefore, do the work by little and 



EMIGRATION OF PAUPEES. 63 

little, and by their own labour and that of their 
families. In common humanity such an emigrant, 
sent out at the expense of the country, must be pro- 
vided with land, seed, tools, and eighteen months' 
subsistence. If not, he must starve ; and better for 
him, and cheaper for the country, to let him starve of 
cold and hunger under the lee of a hedge at home in 
England, than under the lee of a pine-tree in America. 
Let no poor man emigrate in search of employment. 
The labour market in such a state of society as that 
of an agricultural colony, in which every settler is 
himself a labourer, working for his own subsistence, 
on his own lot of land, and with no capital, in general, 
to pay wages with but his growing crops, is necessarily 
very limited, and easily overstocked. The high wages, 
the three, four, and five shillings a day, for common 
labour, or ordinary handicraft-work, which the crimps 
of the land companies talk of, and advertise, and write 
home about, are barefaced deceptions. What are the 
products of any of our colonies, that can afford such 
wages? Is it wheat, or timber, or wool, that can 
afford five shillings a day for common labour in pro- 
ducing them, or working about them, or that can enable 
the owner of them to pay high wages continually, 
for any kind of work, however much he may require 
it ? A rate of wages, higher than the value of the 
products of a colony to the producers can afford, 
is no safe ground for a working-man to emigrate 
upon. Such rates soon find their true level; and that 
is, a bare subsistence for part of the year, and in the 
winter half-year, or when a job of work is finished, no 
wages, and no out-door work to be found within a 
hundred miles. It is only in a dense population, with 
classes too opulent to work themselves, that a working- 



64 EMIGRATION OF SMALL CAPITALISTS. 

man can find steady employment. He can find none 
in a population of small proprietors, working them- 
selves with their families on their own land, and 
requiring no hired labourers for its cultivation, and 
with no means to pay them if they did require them. 

Let no prudent working-man, who has saved a little 
money — from thirty or forty to two or three hundred 
pounds — emigrate to any of these flash colonies pa- 
tronised by government and advertised by land com- 
panies, because he hears land is cheap and good. I 
will give him good reasons why. The working-class 
emigrant, with his little saved capital, invested in a 
lot of land in any of these colonies, has not the means 
to pay for religion, education, law, police; not to 
mention roads, bridges, and all the other public esta- 
blishments and works required in a new country. He 
is labouring with his axe and hoe from morn to night, 
in the bosom of the forest, and has no. means to esta- 
blish these ; yet these, be it remembered, are as neces- 
sary as food and raiment to the existence of a civilised 
labouring man. Is the emigrant to pay for all these 
by colonial taxation ? Then what is his lot of land 
to cost his family, in the course of two generations ? 
Is he to pay for all these in the first cost of his land, 
the twenty pounds per acre paid to the land company 
at home for his lot ? Then on what principle is he 
made to pay for establishments, for roads, piers, 
bridges, churches, schools, and such public works, in 
the arrangement or settlement of which he is to have 
no voice ? And on what principle is the earlier emi- 
grant made to pay for what the later emigrant is to 
have the advantage of for nothing ? He had better, 
methinks, stay at home, where the first cost of all the 
civilisation establishments of society have been paid 



OBJECTIONS TO EMIGRATION. 65 

for him a thousand years ago ! A prudent man would 
not accept a lot of land for nothing in Canada, Austra- 
lia, or Xew Zealand. The land would be dearer to 
his grand-children, if they are to live in a civilised 
way, than an equal area of land in Great Britain ; 
because all the expenses of placing them on the 
footing and with the benefits of a civilised people, 
must be paid out of their earnings. They inherit 
nothing as the people of the mother country do, in 
the shape of roads, bridges, churches, schools, quays, 
prisons, court-houses, and such needful public works. 
The natural and legitimate fund, out of which all the 
civilisation expenses of a colony, the public works 
necessary to a civilised society, ought to be defrayed, 
is unquestionably its uncleared land. But this fund 
has been anticipated and granted away, at various 
times, to land speculators. At the commencement of 
emigration to our American provinces, now the United 
States, the grantees were lords, favourites at Court, or 
local governors ; at a later period, in our Canadian pos- 
sessions, they were military officers, or speculators 
with political interest at home ; now they are joint- 
stock companies of land-jobbers. All these grants 
are opposed to sound principles of colonisation. They 
absorb the means, and restrict the self-government 
of the colonial body. If the colonial legislatures were 
to declare all grants of land not occupied and settled 
within a reasonable period of six or eight years, to be 
null and void, and the land so granted to have lapsed 
to the colonial state, for colonial uses, the measure 
would in reason be justifiable. The unsettled lands 
of a colony belong to the colonised state, and are the 
proper fund out of which all public works should be 
constructed, according to the growing need of the 

F 



§6 OBJECTIONS TO EMIGRATION. 

colonists for them, from generation to generation, and 
according to the judgment of the colonists themselves 
as to the time, situation, and extent. It may be 
doubted whether the parent state has, in reason and 
equity, any right to grant the unsettled lands, which 
are the common good of a colony ; although the law, 
which considered the former British provinces, now 
the United States of America, to be part and parcel 
of the manor of Greenwich, would entertain no 
such doubt. The idle speculators in share companies 
at home, who have obtained grants recently in New 
Zealand, Australia, and Canada, of extensive tracts of 
land, undertake, no doubt, the construction of certain 
public works — roads, churches, school-houses, piers, 
bridges — on their own land. But there is no self- 
government in this system of colonisation, and there- 
fore no soundness in its principle. Prudent reflecting 
men, with a little saved capital, will not emigrate, to 
be the passive live-stock of a land company at home, 
on whose discretion and doings, in the most important 
local affairs and interests of the colony, they have no 
check or voice. People do not go to a colony to be 
done for, like children in leading-strings, or soldiers 
in barracks, or paupers in an asylum. They go to do 
for themselves, to have something to say, in propor- 
tion to their means, stake, and judgment, in the in- 
ternal affairs and interests of the community in which 
they live. The difference between Canada and the 
United States shows the difference between a people 
being done for, and doing for themselves, in emigra- 
tion and colonising. If the working-man, with a little 
saved capital, is hesitating about emigrating, he would 
do well to sit down and reckon up the passage-money, 
purchase-money of the land, cost of tools, stock, seed, 



REASONS AGAINST EMIGRATION. 67 

shelter, food, clothing, until his land maintains him 
and his family, and which maintenance he can scarcely 
expect before the third year's crop ; and if he reckon 
up the time and labour, which are his capital, ex- 
pended before his lot of land is in full heart and 
bearing and supporting his family in a civilised way, 
he will find that three hundred pounds of money, or 
of money's worth, in time and labour, are gone, and 
he is but very poorly off after all. 

I will give him another cogent reason against emi- 
gration. This nation of ours is past that stage in 
its social condition in which a people can throw off 
agricultural colonies from the main body. Two 
hundred years ago, when the peopling of the old 
American colonies was going on, the great mass of 
the population of the mother- country was essentially 
agricultural ; but every working-man could turn his 
hand to various kinds of work, as well as to the 
plough. He was partly a smith, carpenter, wheel- 
wright, stone-mason, shoemaker. The useful arts 
were not, as now, entirely in the hands of artisans 
bred to no other labour but their own trade or art ; 
very expert, skilful, and cheap producers, in that ; 
but not used to, or acquainted with, any other kind 
of work. This inferior stage of civilisation in which 
men were not co-operative to the same extent as now, 
but every man did a little at every thing, and made 
a shift with his own unaided workmanship and pro- 
duction, was a condition of society very favourable to 
emigration-enterprise, and to colonisation. It con- 
tinues still in the United States, and is the main 
reason why their settlers in the back woods are more 
handy, shift better for themselves, and thrive better 
than the man from this country, who has been all his 

F 2 



68 REASONS AGAINST THE EMIGRATION 

life engaged in one branch of industry, and in that 
has had the co-operation of many trades preparing 
his tools and the materials for his work. Another ad- 
vantage for emigration in that state of society which 
we in Britain have entirely outgrown, was, that the 
female half of the population contributed almost as 
much as the male half to the subsistence of a family, 
especially an emigrant family ; and produced, by work 
in the household, what made or saved money. I 
should like to know if one emigrant father of an 
English family in ten thousand could say, in our 
days, to his wife and daughters : — " Here, my dears, I 
have brought you the fleeces of our score of sheep 
that I have been shearing this morning. You will 
take them and sort the wool, and card it, and spin it, 
and weave it, and waulk it, and dye it, and shape it, 
and sew it, and do all other needful operations with it, 
to make a coat for me, and petticoats for yourselves 
against winter; for it is not worth travelling a score 
miles to sell a few stones weight of wool to the mer- 
chant, and the price would go but a small way in 
buying our woollen clothing. And here, my dears, 
is our rig of flax just fit for pulling ; you will turn 
to and pull it, bind it, steep it, rot it, skutch it, hackle 
it, spin it, weave it, bleach it ; and if we have more 
linen than we need ourselves, we can sell a web or 
two of it to the town's-people." The mistress would 
probably reply:—" John, I never did any such work 
with wool or flax, and I don't know how it should be 
done. My grandmother, indeed, had all such work 
done in her family ; and, besides, could brew, and 
bake, and make cheese, soap, candles, and a thousand 
things that I and my daughters never did, or saw 
done : because, long before my day, such house work 



OF THE ENGLISH OF THE PKESENT AGE. 69 

went out of fashion in every family, high or low. 
Home-made cloth was too coarse for the poorest to 
wear, and cottons, and factory-made cloths of all kinds 
were finer, better, and cheaper. We can wash, sew, 
cook, make the beds, and sweep the house ; but we 
never learnt to spin, or weave, or knit, or bleach, or 
dye, or do any work that brings in money ; because 
the factory did all such work in England far better 
and cheaper than single-handed women." 

The English emigrants of our times have, in fact, 
to subsist one half of their numbers, the female half, 
by the labour of the other half ; for the female work, 
cooking, washing, bed-making, house-cleaning, however 
needful, can neither make nor save money in the emi- 
grant family. In the days of King James, and of 
Charles I. and Charles II. , and down even to the end of 
the last century, the emigrant could reckon upon the 
household work of the females of his family as more or 
less profitable, and at least saving, by the production 
of all clothing material. In genteel families at home, 
all the family linen and cloth for common wear, and 
often some for sale in the country towns, was pro- 
duced by household work. The progress of society 
to a higher state of material refinement, has entirely 
superseded such family production. Co-operative 
labour in factories supplies the public with much 
better and finer goods ; and the public taste is so 
much refined by the continual enjoyment of finer 
articles, that the old mode and quality of production 
would not satisfy it now : but that former state 
was more favourable to emigration than our present 
more advanced social condition. There seems to be 
a stage in the progress of nations at which they can 
throw off swarms with most success. A nation, like 

r a 



70 REASONS AGAINST THE EMIGRATION 

an individual, may become too refined for colonising ; 
its social state too co-operative ; men too dependent 
on other men for the gratification of acquired tastes 
and habits, which have become part of their nature, 
and interwoven with the daily life even of the poorer 
classes. The English of the present times emigrate 
under a disadvantage, compared to their forefathers, 
or to the descendants of the same stock in the United 
States, or to the German people ; because they emi- 
grate from a higher and more advanced social condi- 
tion. The German or American family may settle in 
the solitary backwoods or prairies, and provide every 
thing they want in-doors and out of doors by their 
own unaided labour, or go without what they cannot 
produce as they would do at home ; and in a very 
short time they are in a state very little different from 
that in which they were bred and to which they were 
used. The English, even of the labouring class, have 
wants, habitual comforts, tastes, and objects considered 
necessaries of life, which they cannot supply by their 
own labour and skill, and which they cannot obtain in 
a social state in which people do not work for mutual 
supply by the sale or exchange of products for pro- 
ducts, but each family simply for its own use and 
supply. Their single-handed labour cannot produce 
what they require, although in their own trades they 
are workmen of unrivalled excellence. An English 
weaver could not make a tub, nor an English cooper 
a web of cloth ; but either of them can make his own 
article incomparably better than the German or 
American settler, who even in his original home is 
accustomed to put up with such rough articles as he 
can make for himself in weaving or coopering, or to 
go without what he cannot produce. The people of 



OF THE ENGLISH OF THE PRESENT AGE. 71 

England have got far beyond such a rude state of 
society ; but so much the worse fitted are they to be- 
come successful and contented emigrants in a rude, 
uncleared, thinly inhabited country. 

If the English, and many of the Scotch, are too far 
advanced in civilisation, too much accustomed to the 
productions of co-operative labour in all the useful 
arts, to emigrate with advantage, the Irish people are 
too far behind in their civsailition, have too few wants 
and acquired tastes to become enterprising and suc- 
cessful settlers. A corner to lie down in upon a litter 
of straw, a diet of potatoes, and a ragged covering of 
old cast-off clothing, may be found in Liverpool or 
Glasgow, as well as at Montreal or New York ; and 
emigration, industry, and exertion are at a stand with 
a great many of the lower class of the Irish people 
at the place where these requirements can be found. 
The Scotch Highlanders, even in the most remote 
parts of the Highlands, and where the Gaelic only is 
spoken, are very far in advance of their Celtic brethren 
from Ireland. The Highland family is very often 
half-naked as well as the Irish of the same destitute 
class ; but the clothing they have is generally of their 
own making, and not the cast-off clothing of other 
poor people. What they get or buy of old clothes, 
they always attempt to fit and make suitable for 
themselves. They have the arts of spinning, weaving, 
shoemaking, and they want the materials, wool, flax, 
leather, rather than the skill and taste among them 
to clothe themselves respectably. They are remark- 
ably distinguished from the Irish of the same race, 
language, and condition, by a very strong taste for 
finery in dress, and in the poorest hut, and under the 
coarest plaid, the civilising influence of this taste is 

F 4 



72 EMIGRATION FROM GERMANY. 

visible. This influence of personal vanity, and the 
self-respect which it indicates and produces in the 
character of the Highlander, seem altogether dormant 
in the character of the same class of the Irish people. 
The animal wants even, food, shelter, warmth, seem 
to call forth little foresight, exertion, or prudence to 
provide for them. A. motive for emigration is wanting 
in this state of contented wretchedness, and ignorance 
of the tastes and objects of civilised existence. Such 
emigrants will only find or make a new Ireland in a 
new country. They want the tastes, and desires which 
stimulate industry and civilise a people but little re- 
moved in their habits from a state of nature. The 
emigration from Ireland at present going on, that of 
the small capitalists, farmers, and people with the 
means, tastes, and habits of a higher class than the 
lowest, is in reality a loss, not a relief, to the popula- 
tion remaining behind. They are the people (and 
there are not certainly too many of them in Ireland) 
who give employment and example, and diffuse objects 
and tastes of civilised life and habits of industry to 
gratify them, among the inert mass of the population 
below and around them. To encourage the emigra- 
tion of this middle class from Ireland, and no other 
class has the means and habits to become settlers 
elsewhere, is to remove the only machinery by which 
the Irish people can be raised above their present con- 
dition. It is draining off all between the scum and 
the dregs, between the squires and the paupers, in the 
social body. 

Emigration takes off, it is supposed,about a hun- 
dred thousand people annually from Germany. They 
go principally to the United States from Havre, 
Antwerp, the Ports of Holland, and Bremen, and 



EMIGRATION FROM GERMANY. 73 

are of the class of peasants possessing some pro- 
perty. The heavy taxation, the military service, 
and the religious persecution of the Lutherans and 
Calvinists by the late King of Prussia in his Sile- 
sian provinces, are the causes given by the emi- 
grants for leaving their native country. The reli- 
gious persecution of the Protestants by the bigot who 
ruled in Prussia, the late King Frederick William II. , 
is veiled over, and concealed from the public, by a 
subdued and servile press, but is the most flagrant 
act of oppression and despotic power for coercing a 
people in their religion, that has been committed in 
Europe since the days of Louis XI V., and of our 
sovereigns of the Stuart family. The German go- 
vernments opposed at first the emigration of their 
subjects. They were alarmed at the numbers who 
were making preparations to remove from their do- 
minions, and threw every obstacle in the way of 
emigrants. But the opposition increased the desire 
to leave the native country, without increasing the 
means to prevent it. Where the functionary system 
and its superintendence over the people were most 
perfect, and interfered the most with all private 
action, it was found impossible to prevent the people 
from deserting the country, privately slipping over 
the frontier, and removing their property, or its value, 
by a secret understanding Avith their neighbours. All 
intercourse between man and man must have been 
suspended in Germany, and all sales of property, and 
all business must have ceased, if the suspicion of an 
intention to emigrate had been made a hindrance to 
ordinary transactions between individuals, and the 
power of acting on such a suspicion placed in the 
hands of an inferior local functionary in every parish. 



7"4 LETTERS OF EXPATRIATION, 

The speculations of Malthus, also, and of other politi- 
cal economists, on the evils of over-population, and on 
the readiness with which every real vacuum in the 
population of a country is filled up, enlightened the 
statesmen of Germany, and emigration began to be 
considered salutary rather than prejudicial to a state. 
At first, a tax on emigration was levied in some 
states, as a compensation to the state for the military 
service of the emigrant of which it was deprived ; but 
in general the right to emigrate has of late been 
freely conceded. 

In Prussia, the persons intending to emigrate have 
to make application to government for letters of expa- 
triation. They give up all rights as Prussian subjects ; 
such as rights of inheritance of land or fixed pro- 
perty, rights to carry on their trades, and whatever 
other rights or privileges they may have enjoyed; 
and the government, on the other hand, releases them 
from their military service, taxes, and other liabilities 
as Prussian subjects. In some of the minor states, 
it was required that the military duty of three years, 
should be completed, or a compensation paid to the 
government for the loss of the emigrant's service ; but 
as the landwehr system brings many more soldiers into 
the ranks than the finances of the country can support, 
the permission to emigrate is seldom refused. With- 
out the official permission, or letter of expatriation, 
the emigrant would be liable still, as a Prussian subject, 
to be cited to appear and to perform his military dut}'; 
and, on his non-appearance, would be liable to confis- 
cation of his property, loss of his rights to the inheri- 
tance of property, and punishment as a deserter if he 
returned at any time to his native country. Letters 
of expatriation might perhaps be useful even in the 



LETTEKS OF EXPATRIATION. 75 

case of British subjects ; as. for instance, of registered 
British seamen going into foreign service. In America, 
a few weeks' residence gives the rights of an American 
citizen to the subject of any other country. But, 
according to the law of all European countries, the 
subject cannot throw off his native allegiance ; and 
there is, consequently, a very serious, dormant, un- 
settled question still pending between the American 
law and the international . law of Europe. American 
citizenship would not protect a born subject of France, 
Prussia, England, or any other European country, 
from the penalties of treason if taken prisoner when 
in arms against his native sovereign ; nor, in time of 
peace, would it protect him, or his property, if he 
were found in his native country, from the liabilities 
of other subjects; from the conscription, landwehr 
duty, impressment, or other military service, for 
instance, or from the personal or class tax payable by 
other subjects not provided with letters of expatria- 
tion. In the last war, American citizenship did not 
prevent the impressment of British-born seamen. 
The right of search for them in American vessels was 
denied by America ; but the right to treat them as 
native subjects when not under a neutral flag was never 
allowed to be questioned by the British government ; 
and it was not the merchant flag, but only the national 
flag in vessels belonging to the foreign state in which 
they had acquired citizenship, that was, from the 
courtesy between states, allowed to exempt from 
search the vessels in which subjects of Great Britain 
were harboured. It is not likely that impressment 
will ever again be resorted to for manning the British 
navy ; but many other relations may arise even in 
time of peace, involving the liabilities of the subjects 



76 WANT OF EMPLOYMENT, NOT OF FOOD, 

of European countries, and the rights claimed for 
American adopted citizens. The arrest of debtors, 
although they may have returned to their native 
country under the American flag, and with American 
citizenship, the liability to military duty and to taxes 
as other subjects, and the penalties for having evaded 
them, could not be stayed by any right acquired as 
American citizens. Letters of expatriation delivered 
to all, to seamen or others, who are leaving this 
country and wish to become citizens or subjects of 
another, and to renounce the rights and privileges of 
British subjects, whether as peers or commoners, and 
to take up those of French or American citizens, would 
perhaps settle practically this very delicate question 
of international law, which, as the intercourse be- 
tween countries increases, may disturb the friendly 
feeling between England and all the European 
countries, and the United States. The letters of expa- 
triation adopted by the Prussian government seem a 
wise measure ; and, if given freely, compromise no 
right or privilege of the subject. They seem founded 
on an equitable principle which might be adapted to 
our own relations with America, and might obviate 
angry collisions between the countries at a future 
day. 

It is evident that neither emigration, factories, nor 
fisheries can absorb any considerable proportion of the 
over-population of Ireland. These schemes are not 
remedies, scarcely palliatives, for the social disease. 
But in what does the disease consist ? In ordinary 
seasons, and exclusive of the extraordinary failure of 
the potato crop for three successive years, it is not an 
over-population in proportion to the capability and 
extent of the Irish soil, nor even to the amount of 



IS THE EVIL IN IRELAND. 7< 

food actually raised from it, but an over-population 
in proportion to the employment and the means of 
the people to buy food. In the midst of the famine 
of 1847, and the importation and gratuitous distri- 
bution of meal, Indian corn, and other food for 
the starving population, Ireland was exporting food. 
The people had no employment by which they could 
earn wages to buy the food produced in the country. 
An increase of food raised in Ireland, by the general 
introduction of improved modes of farming, would in 
reality diminish, not increase, the quantity of em- 
ployment given to the people by the present wretched 
husbandry. It is, no doubt, at present, employment 
misapplied; but where there is no other employment, 
and the employed get at least a potato diet by it, the 
introduction of better modes of farming would be a 
general evil, not a general good, unless other employ- 
ment were provided for the people. At present it 
cannot be denied that three men are doing the work 
in a potato field, or on a small cotter farm, which 
one expert ploughman could do better, and in half the 
time ; but two of the three would be starved by this 
agricultural improvement which would dispense with 
their unnecessary or superfluous services. The use- 
ful arts cannot go on out of proportion, and out of 
relation to the social state of a country, and to each 
other, without detriment to society greater than the 
advantage from the premature improvement of any 
one of them. 

Considering that two millions of people in a popu- 
lation of eight millions would, by any general change 
in the present system of land occupancy for the pur- 
pose of agricultural improvement in Ireland, be thrown 
out of employment, homes, and subsistence, however 



78 DANGER OE IRISH IMPROVEMENTS. 

wretched these may be, and thrown loose, desperate, 
and destitute upon the country ; and that Irish fish- 
eries, factories, or emigration, allowing such schemes 
the utmost success that can in reason be expected, are 
mere delusions when seriously proposed as sufficient 
means for absorbing, or providing for any consider- 
able proportion of this vast and increasing mass of 
starving population, the government ought to pause 
before encouraging the dangerous and inhuman clear- 
ances of the small cotter-tenantry from the face of the 
land. There are emergencies when governments must 
interfere with the rights of a class for the protection 
of the whole mass of the people, and when even 
admitted nuisances must be tolerated, and only re- 
moved gradually from the social body. 



DIVISION OF LAND IN IRELAND. 79 



CHAP. V. 

NOTES ON THE CAUSES OF THE DIVISION AND SUBDIVISION OF TENANT 

OCCUPANCIES IN IRELAND WANT OF PROPERTY — WANT OF 

EMPLOYMENT — STRONG FAMILY AFFECTION WHY THE SAME 

CAUSES DO NOT PRODUCE THE SAME EFFECTS IN OTHER COUN- 
TRIES WANT OF THE SENSE OF PROPERTY AMONG SMALL 

COTTER-TENANTS. — STRONG SENSE OF PROPERTY AMONG SMALL 

PEASANT-PROPRIETORS. THE DIVISIVE ELEMENT ONLY AT WORK, 

THE AGGREGATIVE ELEMENT DORMANT LN THE SOCIAL STATE 

OF IRELAND. THE MANNERS, WAY OF LIVING-, COSTUME OF 

PEASANT-PROPRIETORS CONSERVATIVE. — WELL-BEING IN THIS 

SOCIAL STATE. INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL CONDITION OF THIS 

CLASS. — NATIONAL WEALTH AND NATIONAL WELL-BEING NOT 
ALWAYS THE SAME ADVANTAGES OF THE SMALL-ESTATE OC- 
CUPANCY. WHICH OF THE TWO SOCIAL STATES IS PREFERABLE. 

IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION. DUTY OF THE TRAVELLER 

TO STATE BOTH SIDES OF IT IMPARTIALLY. 

It cannot be denied that, in the 562,000 small farms 
in Ireland, the division and subdivision of the land, 
or its product, the potato crop, goes on to the very 
minimum of subsistence for an over-population. The 
fact is honourable to the Irish character. It is the re- 
sult of strong feelings of family affection, and of the 
the sense of duty in the parents prompting them, even 

* It is stated in a Report to the Statistical Society in September, 1849, 
that in 1848 there were 564,274 farmers in Ireland not employing hired 
labour ; 44,262 farms under 1 acre ; and from 1 to 30 acres, 473,755. But 
in 1847, there were 530,555 of this class ; and in 1841, there were 636,997. 
A clearance in seven years of 163,242 small farms on which, reckoning 
five persons to a family, 816,210 people found employment and food, or 
contrived to subsist, will account for much of the distress in Ireland in 
1848. Above 800,000 persons who had a living in 1841, were thrown 
into beggary and destitution by 1848, and no employment provided for 
them. 



80 DIVISION OF LAND IN IRELAND. 

in their most distressed circumstances, to share with 
their children, and their children's children, and even 
with relatives much more distantly connected, what- 
ever they have of food, lodging, or land. Let no man, 
in the fulness of his political economy, sneer at this 
virtuous and honourable propensity of the very poorest 
of the Irish nation. The fact also proves that it is 
not food, but employment, in proportion to population, 
that, in ordinary seasons, is the great want in Ire- 
land. The want of employment is necessarily accom- 
panied by a want of property among the labouring 
class, and the want of property by the want of pru- 
dence, and by the want of influences to counteract the 
reckless improvidence of men in hopeless circum- 
stances. Men living without means or prospect of 
improving their condition, have no motives to exert 
foresight or economy. The landowners and the law 
may prevent the small tenant from actually dividing 
the small farm he rents, into farms, or subholdings, 
still smaller and from building huts on those smaller 
portions of land for his children, or relatives, to dwell 
in. But this would onlv correct the e\dl of subdivision 
to the eye. No law, or landlord right, can prevent 
the small tenant from lodging and feeding his own 
children, or friends, in his own dwelling, with his 
own food, although his children or friends be grown 
up, and married ; or from his employing their labour 
on his potato land. Any interference of landlords, or 
of the law, would only make the evil worse, by forcing 
the population to be under-lodged, as well as under-fed, 
and crowding three generations into one hovel, in- 
stead of allowing them to have three to live in. The 
land would not be subdivided to the eye ; but, what in 
social effect would be the same, the products of the 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY. 81 

land would be divided and sub-divided, for the sub- 
sistence of the same number of people as before. No 
human law can prevent the working of that law of 
Nature, implanted in the heart of man as in the in- 
ferior animals, upon which all this division and sub- 
division of the land in Ireland is founded ; viz. the 
love of offspring, the duty of sharing with them what- 
ever parental affection can contrive to share, be it 
ever so scanty. 

But why does not the same cause produce the same 
effects in other countries as in Ireland? Why is not 
the land here, in Flanders, or in Switzerland, or in Nor- 
way, frittered down, as in Ireland, into portions too 
small to afford a civilised subsistence to the culti- 
vators ? The land is occupied, as in Ireland, in small, 
not in large, farms. The natural affection for off- 
spring and near relations is not less strong among 
the people of those countries, and the division of the 
land among the children of the proprietor is favoured 
by law, and compulsory, as a provision for them on 
the parent's death. Why, then, do we not find in 
those countries in which small farms are of old 
standing in very extensive districts, a division and 
sub-division of the land, or its products, as in Ire- 
land, down to half a potato bed, or a half diet of 
potatoes twice a day ? The reason seems to be, that 
the powerful influence on mind and conduct, which 
may be called the sense of property, is an effective 
check, in general, upon improvident marriages among 
the class of peasant-proprietors, and upon wasteful 
habits, and indolence in acquiring property to add to 
what they possess. The small tenant-farmers or 
cotter-population of Ireland, have no such check, 
having no land of their own to raise and foster this 

G 



82 AGGREGATION OF LAND AMONG 

sense of property in their social condition. There is, 
also, in those countries, an element of aggregation, as 
well as one of division and sub-division, at work in 
society and acting on property. In Ireland, it is the 
divisive element only that is at work, the aggregative 
element is wanting. The occupants of the 562,000 
small farms in Ireland, the two millions eight hundred 
thousand people living on them, are tenants, not pro- 
prietors. They cannot acquire by marriage, inherit- 
ance, or purchase from each other any addition to 
the small lots of land they occupy at yearly rents as 
tenants, although they cannot be prevented from di- 
viding and sub-dividing their small lots, or, what in 
social effect is the same, the subsistence produced from 
them, according to the dictates of parental affection. 
In the other countries occupied by small farmers 
holding ]ots of land of similar extent, the small 
farmers are the owners, and not merely the tenants, of 
the land they occupy. This class is numerous, and 
possesses a great proportion of all the land of those 
countries. The aggregation, consequently, of land 
into larger lots by marriages, inheritance from col- 
lateral relatives, and by sale and purchase among 
themselves, of lots of land too small to employ and 
subsist the heirs in the way they have been accustomed 
to live, is going on naturally every day, as well as the 
division and sub-division among the children by the 
deaths of the parents. Over the whole of a country 
and population, this element of aggregation, which is 
totally wanting in the social condition and state of 
landed property in Ireland, must in the natural 
course of things equal the element of division, and 
counterbalance its tendency. In a former work on 
the social state of Norway, where the occupation of 



SMALL PEASANT-PROPRIETORS. 83 

the land by peasant-proprietors has been for many 
ages in the fullest development, I have endeavoured 
to explain, on this principle, the fact that, notwith- 
standing the equal inheritance of all the children of 
the parent proprietor, the land is not divided and 
sub-divided into portions too small to subsist the occu- 
pant ; that society is not reduced to the state of the 
Irish peasantry; and that the equal division among the 
children is counteracted by the succession of heirs to 
collateral relatives, by marriages, and by purchase. 
There is practically no division of the land itself in 
those countries, like that which takes place in the 
tenant occupancies in Ireland. The actual division 
of the land itself into lots too small to afford employ- 
ment and subsistence according to a certain conven- 
tional standard, rarely takes place in those countries 
in which this social arrangement of the small owner- 
ship of land has been long established. The price of 
the lot is of more value to the heir than the land 
itself, if it be too small to support him in the way 
customary in his class, and he sells it to some co-heir 
or neighbour, who has houses' and stock to cultivate 
it and append it to his own land, and the heir with 
his little capital turns to some other means of sub- 
sistence. There is a strong conservative principle, 
also, in the social condition of a body of small land- 
owners of old standing, which cannot exist in a body 
of small tenants removable at each term, and with no 
right of property in their farms. The owner of six 
acres of land is under the same moral influence as the 
owner of six hundred. He has a social position to 
maintain ; a feeling of being obliged to live as respect- 
ably as his equals ; a customary standard in his house, 
furniture, clothing, food, to support ; a repugnance to 

G 2 



84 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE: COSTUME. 

derogate from what ancient custom has estab- 
lished as suitable in his station, and an equal repug- 
nance to be thought imprudent or extravagant, by 
exceeding it. There are few positions in life in 
which men live under such powerful social restraints, 
as in the class of peasant-proprietors. Their houses, 
furniture, clothing, diet, utensils, and even modes of 
working, are fixed and regulated by ancient custom 
from which no individual can deviate, without in a 
manner losing caste. The traveller often comes into 
a district in which all the inhabitants are clothed in 
one peculiar distinct costume, often of very antique 
fashion, and generally of home-made materials. He 
may always conclude that the district is one in 
which the occupancy of the land by small peasant- 
proprietors is of ancient standing, and predominant. 
These local costumes on the Continent are very inter- 
esting to the antiquary. They represent frequently 
the very dress, both in fashion and material, worn 
by the higher classes in the early part of the middle 
ages, before silks and fine cloths, or stuffs from Lom- 
bardy or Flanders, were generally diffused, and had 
driven the home-made materials of clothing, and the 
fashion of garments they were applied to, from the 
upper to the lower ranks of the people. The costume in 
some parts of the Continent is the same, at the present 
day, as the garb of noble dames and knights, repre- 
sented on ancient tombstones, or in carvings, tapestry, 
and missals. The flower-girls at Hamburgh, from 
the Vierlander on the Elbe, and the females of the 
Probstei, a district on the Baltic coast between Kiel 
and Lubeck, with their bunchy jupes, or petticoats like 
a Highlander's philibeg, scarcely reaching below the 
knee ? but with a profusion of folds and plaits, making 



HABITS AMONG PEASANT-PROPRIETORS. 85 

up, in the ample latitude of this indispensable gar- 
ment, for the alarming deficiency in its longitude, are 
the very figures on the brasses and sculptured monu- 
ments in ancient cathedrals. These local costumes 
have an interest also for the social economist : they 
are a standard of clothing which regulates in these 
several districts the expense, preparation, and labour 
to be bestowed upon the apparel of every individual of 
a class which comprehends almost the whole popula- 
tion. The costume is the same for all in materials, 
pattern, and colour, whatever may be the diversity in 
the wealth of the individuals. The Dutch boor in 
North Holland, who possesses shares in East India- 
men, is not distinguishable in dress from the boor who 
has only his house and piece of land. Costume is not 
confined to dress : it extends to the furniture, the 
household goods, the housekeeping, the diet, the farm 
work. A sameness and equality are deemed necessary 
for respectability: nor is this common standard in 
dress very low ; ornaments of silver, such as buckles, 
clasps, and dangling rows of buttons to some value, 
are worn in some districts by all respectable peasants. 
Gold earrings, lace, amber necklaces, enter into the 
common female attire in others. In Holland, and 
from Groningen to Embden, and northwards to the 
Elbe and Eyder, in the Frisian branch of the popu- 
lation, every girl, to be respectably dressed even in 
the station of a servant-maid, must have a frontlet 
or thin clasp of gold across her forehead. These are 
checks which society forms for itself upon improvi- 
dence in marriage, or extravagance in living. A man 
who cannot afford those articles deemed respectable 
and necessary in his station, cannot marry without 
visible imprudence, or find a woman to marry him< 

G 3 



86 SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONDITION 

To be without them would be a manifest derogation, 
as inexorable custom requires them in his and her 
social position, and to attain them depends upon 
ordinary industry ; as the clothing materials are prin- 
cipally home made, the fashion is common to all, and 
the trinkets, or gold or silver ornaments, are of known 
value suited to what the earnings of a young couple 
ought to afford if they can afford to marry. 

There is, unquestionably, much well-being in such 
a social state. It carries within itself a powerful 
moral and economical check upon over-population 
from the division and sub-division of the land, or from 
improvident marriages. The unchanged customs for 
ages, in respect of clothing, lodging, and food, where 
this state prevails, prove that there is little deteriora- 
tion going on in the social condition of the people. 
Pauperism will exist in the one state of society as well 
as in the other ; but not to the same extent in that 
state in which the great majority of individuals have 
some property, t and of that simple kind that each can 
see whether his portion of land can or cannot support a 
family. The amount of total destitution also, that is, 
of persons in total want of food and all necessaries of 
life, will be smaller where every individual is connected 
by relationship with others who, as peasant proprie- 
tors, although they may have little money, have those 
necessaries in some abundance. 

The intellectual and moral condition also of the 
individuals in such a social state in which almost all 
household wants are provided for by household work, 
may be fairly expected to stand higher than in a social 
state in which the production of all that people use 
or consume, is crammed into factories in the hands of 
a few capitalists employing distinct classes of opera- 



OF THE PEASANT-PROPRIETORS. 87 

tives. The production of clothing materials employs, 
next to the production of food, the greatest numbers 
of the human race. The cotton, woollen, linen, and 
silk manufactories employ as many people probably, 
as agriculture itself, in our system of land occupancy. 
The clothing materials are unquestionably better, 
cheaper, finer, and more varied, than what each family 
could produce by household work for itself; but it 
may be questioned whether there be not a loss to 
society in mind and morals by the factory system of 
production, and one overbalancing the social good of 
printed cottons at sixpence a yard, however fine the 
fabric and fashionable the patterns. The loss is this. 
Adam Smith proves undeniably, that the division of 
labour is the basis of quantity and quality of produc- 
tion in the useful arts ; and that one man working 
at one part only, as at the head, shank, or point of 
a nail or pin, will, with his fellow- workmen, each 
working at his own distinct part only, produce in a 
given time many thousand times more and better pins 
or nails, or whatever it may be that is being manu- 
factured, than if each were to be occupied in making 
the entire pin or nail by his own single-handed labour. 
The superiority of factory work or co-operative, over 
single-handed labour, in quantity, quality, time, cost, 
or profit of production, admits of no doubt ; and the 
division of labour being the basis of extensive and 
cheap production, is the basis of national wealth. 
But national wealth and national well-being are not 
precisely the same thing. Adam Smith evidently 
meant by national wealth, the capability of a nation 
to support its state, or government, by taxation in 
the most expensive enterprises ; and the gain to the 
state or public revenue was the sole question under 

G 4 



88 SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONDITION 

his consideration in his examination of the causes 
of national wealth. But the gain to society by the 
more abundant and cheaper supply and use of the 
articles which minister to our material comforts and 
gratifications in refined life, and which are the basis 
of taxable national wealth, may be more than coun- 
terbalanced by the loss to society in the moral and 
intellectual cultivation of the great mass of popula- 
tion reared and employed in producing those articles. 
If man be an intellectual and moral being, created 
and existing on the face of God's earth for higher ends 
than making pins, or nails, or printed cottons, and for 
nobler purposes than the enjoyment of material com- 
forts and well-being to which, no doubt, pins, nails, and 
printed cottons do, in their way, greatly contribute, 
it may be reasonably doubted if true civilisation and 
well:being do gain so much as political economists 
tell us, by the concentration of labourers in great 
masses in our factories, and the sub-division of their 
labour into minute operations. They are congregated 
in great masses with no steady assured subsistence 
from their labour — a position not favourable to their 
moral condition ; and, when at work, are confined, 
mind and body, to the perpetual repetition of the one 
simple operation required for their particular part of 
the product to be made, which is not favourable to 
their intellectual condition. The exercise of the 
faculties by the application of the mind to a variety 
of operations, the invention, ingenuity, and judgment 
called forth, the resources to be found for want of 
skill, tools, and co-operative aid, make the production 
of an article by single-handed or family work, much 
more intellectual and improving, although the article 
produced be very much inferior and more costly than 



OF WORKING PEASANT-PROPRIETORS. 89 

if it had been produced by factory work. The pro- 
duct is better, but not the producer. His mind is 
less exerted, his faculties less exercised, by his clay's 
work, than the man's who has to apply himself every 
day to various occupations ; who has perhaps to make 
a nail, forge a horse-shoe, nail it on, and yoke his 
cart, drive to market, and sell a load of corn of his 
own sowing, reaping, and threshing. The individual 
doing one single operation all his life, in the sub- 
division of work in the factory he belongs to, will 
scarcely be a man of such mental powers — at least, 
his work will not make him so — as this individual of 
multifarious occupations. The working peasant-pro- 
prietor in Switzerland, who sits down in winter, after 
his crops are reaped, to make a clock, or a gun, will 
not certainly produce a time-piece like one of Dent's, 
or a fowling-piece like one of Smith's ; but his facul- 
ties and thinking powers are more exercised by his 
work, than those of any one operative employed by 
Mr. Dent or Mr. Smith, in making the one separate 
part he is bred to make, in their more perfect ma- 
chines. The factory production makes the individual 
operative a mere tool, or part of a machine, useless 
without the other parts As far as a man's daily oc- 
cupations influence his mental condition, factory work 
tends to lower, not to raise, his intellectual powers 
and intelligence. 

It cannot be denied that, in the small estate occu- 
pancy of the land of a country, a considerable amount 
of national well-being is attained and widely diffused, 
and also of intelligence, and of moral and reflective 
habits. In this social state also there are, more than 
in any other, powerful checks, material and moral, 
arising from the general possession of property, upon 



90 THE NEW SOCIAL STATE OF EUROPE. 

the undue increase of population, and consequently 
upon the undue deterioration of the physical well- 
being of the people. The present condition of the 
peasant-proprietors in Switzerland, the Tyrol, Flan- 
ders, and man}' countries or extensive districts of 
Germany, in all of which this social condition of small 
estate occupancy of the land has been of old standing, 
proves these points in its favour ; nor, fairly con- 
sidered, can any conclusions against it be drawn from 
the opposite tendency or results, in a class so entirely 
different from peasant-proprietors in social positions, 
interests, and motives of action, as the miserable 
over-rented Irish or Scotch small tenants or cotters. 
But the great question still remains : — 

Which of the two social states — that which is spread- 
ing itself over the continent of Europe, the distribu- 
tion of the land into small estates of working peasant- 
proprietors ; or that which exists now in its full 
integrity and vigour in Great Britain only, the 
aggregation of the land into the hands of a compara- 
tively small body of great landed proprietors and 
large farmers — is the more promising for the future 
well-being and progress of society ? There is not, in 
the social economy of Europe, a question more im- 
portant, or of more difficult solution. A change, a 
great revolution in fact, in the social condition, 
relations, connections, and interests of the classes 
or elements of the social body of every European 
country but our own, has been taking place silently, 
but rapidly, during the last half century. The over- 
throw of dynasties and governments, the rise and 
fall of kings, and the revolutions of states, in the 
course of those eventful fifty years, will be considered 
by the future historian as but secondary events — con- 



THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL WELL-BEING IN IT. 91 

sequences not causes, — compared to this great and 
radical change in the spirit and elements of society 
itself, which has produced these convulsions, and 
which is still going on, and will be producing its 
own results for good or for evil, when these most 
recent convulsions of 1848, and 1849, are forgotten 
like last year's thunder-storms. This greatest of 
social revolutions in Europe since the establishment 
of the feudal system, arises from, and consists in the 
infusion of a new preponderating element into the 
social state of the European people, viz. the general 
distribution of the land among the great mass of the 
population. The undeniable good, the physical well- 
being inherent in this new social condition of the 
Continent which is extending itself over every 
country, I have endeavoured to illustrate, in former 
works on Norway, and Sweden, and in preceding 
Xotes on various parts of Europe, showing the state 
of those countries in which the land has, from the 
most remote times, been in the hands of small pro- 
prietors, each working and living on his own small 
estate. I have endeavoured to show that the com- 
fort, the material enjoyments, the domestic good of 
this social state, are widely diffused; and that it is 
not necessarily productive of over-population, of a 
too minute partition of the land for affording a civi- 
lised subsistence, nor of bad or careless husbandry. 
The social state and husbandry of the countries which 
have been, for many ages, in the hands of small 
peasant-proprietors, as Flanders, Switzerland, the 
Tyrol, may stand any comparison with the social 
state and husbandry of Scotland, under large estate 
and large farm occupancy of the land, or of Ireland, 
under large estate and small farm occupancy. I am 



92 NEW AND OLD SOCIAL STATE COMPARED. 

not conscious of having under-estimated any of the 
advantages of this social state. But the traveller, 
like the historian, is bound to show impartially both 
sides of the subject he discusses. I have hitherto 
presented only the credit side of the account. There 
must be a debit side too, as in all human affairs 
social or individual, and, if the items be fairly stated, 
the social economist may pause before he determines 
on which side the balance stands. It is the duty of 
the traveller to state fairly and impartially his ob- 
servations, and reflections, without leaning to any 
system. It is his vocation to suggest, not to judge ; 
to furnish the materials of opinion to the philosopher 
and social economist, not to lay down his own opinion 
and direct all his observations to its support, and to 
shut his eyes on all that may oppose it. The travel- 
ler who is determined to be consistent in his opinions, 
must often sacrifice truth to consistency. I shall en- 
deavour, in the following notes, to state as fully and 
strongly the evils which appear to me inherent in the 
new social condition of the European people, as I 
have stated, in the preceding notes, its undeniable 
advantages and benefits ; leaving the reader to strike 
the balance between the old and new social consti- 
tution, according to his own judgment, experience, 
feelings, and prepossessions. 



THIS SOCIAL STATE NOT PEOGRESSIVE. 93 



CHAP. VI. 

NOTES ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF THE SMALL-ESTATE OCCUPANCY 

OF THE LAND OF A COUNTRY IT IS A STATIONARY, NOT A 

PROGRESSIVE, SOCIAL STATE. WANT OF CO-OPERATIVE INDUSTRY. 

WANT OF MEANS TO CULTIVATE THE TASTES OF A HIGHER 

CIVILISATION. THE SMALL ESTATES NOT ALWAYS DIVIDED, BUT 

GENERALLY BURDENED WITH PAYMENTS TO COHEIRS BY THE 

EQUAL DIVISION OF LAND AMONG THE CHILDREN. WANT OF A 

MIDDLE CLASS BETWEEN THE GOVERNED AND THE GOVERNING 

LN THIS SOCIAL STATE. THE EQUALITY OF CONDITION IN IT 

NOT FAVOURABLE TO LIBERTY. WANT OF DEMAND FOR, AND 

THE MEANS TO PURCHASE, THE OBJECTS OF PEACEFUL INDUSTRY. 
— WANT OF ANY INCREASING EMPLOYMENT FOR THE INCREASING 

POPULATION IN EACH GENERATION. THE YOUTH NECESSARILY 

THROWN FOR EMPLOYMENT INTO MILITARY SERVICE — EFFECTS 
OF THIS WAR-ELEMENT LN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AND DIFFERENT 

AGES. THE HISTORY AND ECONOMY OF THIS SOCIAL STATE 

ADVERSE TO THE VIEWS OF THE PEACE CONGRESS. THE TRUE 

BALANCE BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW SOCIAL STATE OF EUROPE 
NOT TO BE FOUND LN THIS GENERATION. 

Tins state of society is necessarily stationary at a 
certain attainment of well-being. It is not progres- 
sive. It is a state of finality. But in the moral, intel- 
lectual, and social affairs and interests of mankind, 
the law of Nature is to advance and improve. Fi- 
nality is altogether a false, and conventional principle. 
Now, this social state is not, and cannot be progres- 
sive. It admits of no advance in the means or ways 
of living, acting, or thinking, beyond a certain fixed 
hereditary standard ; and one generation cannot afford 
to acquire or to gratify any higher tastes or wants 
than those of the generation preceding it. In the 



94 THIS SOCIAL STATE NOT PROGRESSIVE. 

countries or districts in which this social state has 
been established for ages, as in Switzerland, the Tyrol, 
Norway, Flanders, the man of the 19th century is the 
man of the 14th. His way of living, his way of think- 
ing, his diet, dwelling, dress, his tastes, wants, and 
enjoyments, his ideas, his civilisation, are stereotyped. 
Co-operative industry, science, invention, judgment, 
applied to the ornamental or useful arts, commerce, 
manufactures, the tastes for and enjoyments of the 
objects of civilised life, are dormant to a great degree, 
in a social state which affords no markets, no con- 
sumption, no demand for the productions of the en- 
genuity, skill, and enterprise of other people. All are 
producers of almost all they consume, and no class is 
wealthy enough to set to work a class of producers 
of objects required for their gratification. The having 
enough for the most simple wants and tastes of a 
working agricultural life, the contentedness of a whole 
population with this enough, and the legal impediment, 
from the equal division of property among children, 
to any class in the community attaining permanently 
more than this enough, may be n very happy social 
state, and altogether in accordance with the spirit and 
precepts of ancient philosophers ; but it is a philoso- 
phy of barbarism, not of civilisation ; a social state of 
routine and stagnation, not of activity and progress. 
A nation is composed of families; but where these 
component parts are riot united by common inter- 
ests, and are merely distinct dots upon the face of a 
country, joined together by no want of each other, no 
common requirements supplied by co-operative labour, 
but simply by juxta-position on the land, and a com- 
mon inhabitation under a common government, the 
population can scarcely be called a nation. The ma- 






NO INTERCHANGE OE INDUSTRY IN IT. 95 

terial interests binding people together into one social 
and political body, are too few in this social state. 
There can be little interchange of industry for in- 
dustry, for all are employed equally in producing 
what they consume. There can be no important 
home markets for agricultural products, and none for 
the many products for which great combinations of 
capital, skill, machinery, and co-operative labour of 
body and mind, are required, and which are the en- 
joyments and the tastes of civilised life. Where 
manufactures have been established, as in Swit- 
zerland, Belgium, and on the Rhine, it is upon the 
foreign market, not upon any consumption at home, 
that they depend. In the social state of Britain it 
is the reverse. Our export trade, immense as it is, 
appears but a trifle compared to our home consump- 
tion, in our own families, of all that labour, skill, 
ingenuity, and capital produce for the gratification of 
the tastes and wants of civilised life among our own 
population. The interchange of industry for industry 
among the individual producers in our social state, is 
a perpetual animating principle, like the circulation 
of the blood in the human frame. But this interchange 
this living by each other, and dependence upon each 
other, is necessarily inconsiderable in the other so- 
cial state. Each family is a self-supporting isolated 
unit, living a kind of Robinson Crusoe life on its own 
patch of land, producing in a rough way all it wants, 
and going without what it cannot produce. The 
tastes for the habits, comforts, gratifications, and re- 
finements of a higher state of civilisation are want- 
ing ; because the means to form those tastes are 
wanting, and the classes in the social body who can 
afford to indulge in them and pay for them are 



96 NO MEANS TO ADVANCE TO A HIGHER STATE. 

wanting. The three needful elements in all indivi- 
dual or social progress are time, labour, and capital ; 
and in this social state these are fully occupied in 
keeping up to a certain fixed customary standard of 
living, and cannot get beyond it. Hereditary wealth 
is too rare for the individuals possessing it to form a 
class in society. Any peculiarly fortunate individual 
possessing hereditary or acquired wealth, cannot pru- 
dently go beyond the fixed standard of living of his 
neighbours, because he would stand alone in society; 
and the equal succession of* all his children to his 
property on his death, would bring them back to the 
class of income, the means, the standard of living, and 
the social position, from which he had started. The 
want, in this social state, of a class with more than the 
bare means of living, and with the leisure to apply to 
higher material or intellectual objects than the supply- 
ing of their own household wants by their own house- 
hold work, is not favourable to the progress of society. 
The material objects and interests, and these of the 
lowest kind, must predominate over the intellectual 
and moral. There are intellectual and moral influ- 
ences, and objects, which dignify man as motives of his 
action ; but these must remain almost dormant in 
society, if there be no class free from the cares of 
daily subsistence, and with the education, and leisure 
which an opulent class only can command, to cultivate 
and act on them. Education of an ordinary kind 
may be very widely diffused in this social state ; read- 
ing, writing, and useful acquirements may be im- 
parted to all the population ; and yet education may 
be very defective and uninfluential, and may lose in 
depth, what it gains in breadth. Few in this social 
state are in a situation to enter into those higher 



CHECKS ON THE DIVISION OF LAND. 97 

studies and sciences, which not only elevate the indi- 
vidual to a high pitch of mind, but give society itself 
the language, ideas, and spirit of a higher intellectual 
condition. 

The division of the land among all the children 
of the peasant-proprietor, in consequence of the law 
of equal succession, does not, it has been stated in 
a former note, produce the frittering down of the 
original little estate into still smaller portions among 
the heirs. If the portion of land be too small to 
afford the means to build a house and offices, and to 
live in the way customary among the other peasant 
proprietors of the country, the one heir sells his share 
and interest in the little estate, to the other. One 
of the brothers, and generally the eldest, takes up 
the whole concern — the land, house, and stock, — and 
pays a sum of money or an annuity to each of the 
co-heirs. There is a moral check to the division of 
the land itself into portions too small for subsistence, 
as in Ireland, from the higher standard of living 
and requirements among peasant-proprietors ; and 
there is an economical check from the greater ex- 
pense of constructing the dwellings even of the 
poorest class. But although the land itself is not 
divided and subdivided, the value of the land is, and 
with effects almost as prejudicial to social progress. 
The value of each share becomes a debt or burden 
upon the land. This is the reason that almost all 
the estates of the peasant-proprietors in France, 
which were originally free of debt to the generation 
preceding the present, who acquired them in 1799, 
and the subsequent years, at the sales of the na- 
tional domains and confiscated estates of the Church 
and of the emigrant nobles, are now sunk in debt. 

ii 



98 DIVISION OF THE VALUE OF THE LAND. 

In less than half a century, the second generation 
from the original proprietors of the small estates 
who had them free of debt, are now overwhelmed 
with mortgages. The extent of this indebtedness 
of the small peasant proprietary and its consequen- 
ces are fearful. The amount of registered mortgages 
is stated*, on the authority of M. Audiffret and M. 
Baudot, to have been 11^ milliards of livres, or 450 
millions of pounds sterling, at the 1st July, 1832 ; 
and in 1840, the amount was 12^ milliards, or 500 
millions of pounds sterling ; and, at the same rate of 
progress, it is estimated that the amount of debts 
on the land of the peasant-proprietors in France, 
would not be less, in 1849, than 560 millions of pounds 
sterling. These mortgages represent the value of the 
portions of land belonging to the co-heirs of the 
actual occupants of the original farms. The increase 
of their amount from 1832 to 1849, shows that the 
value to be divided among co-heirs — the value of 
the land — has been increasing during that period. 
The actual occupant peasant-proprietary have had to 
borrow a greater sum in 1849, to pay off the greater 
value of shares of co-heirs, than sufficed in 1832, 
and this must be in consequence of the improved 
value of the land in 1849. It seems, therefore, an 
erroneous conclusion from the facts, to infer a deterio- 
ration of the value of the land from these mortgages ; 
or to infer that the 30 millions of pounds sterling, 
payable yearly by the peasant-proprietary as interest 
of this enormous mass of debt, is capital withdrawn 
from agriculture, and disabling them from culti- 
vating their small estates to the best advantage. 

* See "The Times" newspaper of 18th January, 1850. 



INDEBTEDNESS OF THE SMALL ESTATES. 99 

It is to be remembered that in the small estate 
occupancy of land, hired labour is not an essential 
element — and "the application of capital to agri- 
culture " means in general merely the application of 
hired labour to husbandry-work. Where the land 
is divided into small estates of working proprietors, 
the amount of labour- capital applied to the land by 
family work, is vastly greater than the amount of 
money-capital applied to the land on the large farm 
system. The whole family work on the estate will 
amount to a grown man's labour for every two or 
three acres. One hired labourer for every thirty 
acres is all the capital applied on the large farm sys- 
tem of occupancy. The great evil of this universal 
indebtedness is, that the actual cultivator, although 
he may have the same extent of land as his predeces- 
sor, has not the same means to live, and expend some- 
thing on the comforts and conveniences of a civilised 
and advancing condition. He can make but a bare 
subsistence out of the estate for himself and his family, 
after paying the annuities or interest of the principal 
sum with which he bought out the other co-heirs. It 
is estimated, by the authorities quoted above, that, 
after paying the interest of his debt, and the govern- 
ment taxes and rates, the peasant-proprietor in France 
has not, on an average, above three-eighths of the 
yearly produce of his estate left for his own subsist- 
ence. On his death the burden on the estate is 
increased by an additional set of co-heirs. This is a 
retrograde, not an advancing, condition of the agri- 
cultural population, which is the great mass of the 
social body. Each generation is worse off than the 
preceding one, although the land is neither less, nor 
more divided, nor worse cultivated. The ostensible 

H 2 



100 EVILS OP THE DIVISION OF THE VALUE OF 

owner is more and more burdened with debt in each 
generation, can afford to buy less, and not more, of 
the comforts and conveniences of life ; and conse- 
quently the home market for the products of the 
useful arts, and the taste and habit of enjoying them, 
are diminishing along with the means of the great 
mass of the population to indulge in them. The 
effect of this social state is prejudicial, not only to 
consumers, but to producers. The workman in any 
trade, or handicraft, who has something, however 
small it may be, paid regularly out of his inheritance, 
will scarcely work so steadily as the man who depends 
upon his trade alone, and his skill and expertness as 
a producer. The class of workmen also in the ordi- 
nary crafts, who, in a sound state of society, should 
find constant employment and a good living, by sup- 
plying the agricultural class with the objects of the 
useful arts, are, from the want of means among that 
class to consume, thrown upon production in the 
ornamental arts in greater numbers than the home 
and foreign markets require, or can employ. There 
is, owing to this want of employment in the most 
common trades, a congregated mass of turbulent, 
half-employed, demoralised operatives in every city, 
whom the employment given by the agricultural body 
cannot absorb. 

There is a political want, also, in this social state, 
of an intermediate element, in the construction of 
society, between the governing and the governed — 
one having a moral influence over both. Whatever 
be the form of government, this third element between 
the power of the state and the physical force of the 
people, is indispensable for the security of freedom, 
and stability of social institutions. It prevents the 



THE LAND. WANT OF A THIED SOCIAL CLASS. 101 

direct collision, like the buffers and ballast-waggons 
in a railway train, between the state and the people ; 
and without it there is no security against tyranny 
on the one hand, or anarchy on the other. King and 
people, or state and people, especially if the govern- 
ment be liberal, or democratic, come into direct an- 
tagonism on every, even petty question of public inter- 
est. The aristocracy, or the clergy of the Church 
of Rome, or both, formed this third element in the 
middle ages ; but both are effete on the Continent, in 
this age, as influential powers in society. With us, 
the class of capitalists, of men of high intellectual and 
moral character displayed in situations of importance, 
and the strong prestige in favour of birth, fortune, 
manners, and of what we call nobility and gentry — 
a class very different from the feudal aristocracy of 
the Continent, and depending for social influence 
entirely on popular esteem, not on royal favour — 
constitute this third element in our social structure. 
But no equivalent class, with social influence to stand 
between the aristocratic and democratic elements in 
the social body, has formed itself, or can form itself, 
on the Continent, where the property of land, which is 
almost the only kind of property, is universally dis- 
tributed in small, and almost equal portions. A class, 
with the social influence of great opulence, high 
education, and extensive action in objects important 
and useful to the community, is necessarily of very 
slow growth in a social state in which almost every 
family produces what it consumes, and few have 
means to indulge in those acquired tastes for lux- 
uries, or comforts, which employ commerce and 
manufactures. Where all are equal, or nearly equal 
in property, no pre-eminent social influence is ac- 

ii 3 



102 WANT OF AN INTERMEDIATE ELEMENT 

corded to property ; and the only influence remaining 
in the social body is that of military or civil authority 
held under and from the Crown, or the executive 
power. The people have no independent representa- 
tives, no leaders or defenders, of importance and 
weight, either with their own body, or with their 
rulers ; no influential organs of public opinion ; no- 
thing, in short, to oppose to misgovernment and op- 
pression, but physical force. This is a social state 
much nearer to a military despotism than to a free 
constitution. If we sit down, and try to sketch that 
social condition which practically must be of all 
others the least favourable to the establishment and 
permanence of free institutions, and to the liberty of 
a people, we come unexpectedly and unwillingly to 
the conclusion, that it is the social condition which 
approaches nearest to a perfect equality. Liberty 
and equality ! these are two elements which cannot 
co-exist in society. Liberty and property! the old 
cry of the English mob was practically, and theoreti- 
cally, a more true and philosophical combination of 
ideas ; for liberty would have no protection, guidance, 
or defence, without a class having, by their superior 
stake of property, the confidence of the people. The 
United States of America began with such a class, at 
their disruption from England — a class of gentry of 
old standing in the country, and possessing all the 
influence and prestige that superior education, for- 
tune, and station in life, could give. Washington 
and almost all the leaders in the struggle for American 
independence were of this class ; were in every respect 
the equivalent class to the English gentry or nobility. 
But such a class of independent proprietors, with a 
considerable stake, and a proportionable influence in 



BETWEEN THE GOVERNING AND THE GOVERNED. 103 

the country, has not formed itself on the European 
continent by the breaking up of the estates of the 
feudal aristocracy, and of the Crown and Church 
domains. A very near approach to equality of con- 
dition, has been made — nearer by far than in the 
American republic, because there commerce, capital, 
and industrial enterprise, are widening every day 
the difference of condition between the different 
classes; but this equality on the continent of Eu- 
rope, which extends to education as well as pro- 
perty, seems to be no nearer approach to liberty. A 
republic cannot be formed out of a mob equal, each 
man to his neighbour, in rights, pretensions, claims 
to support, and to public confidence — equal in 
fortune, education, influence, and clamour. This can 
only be an anarchy in which nothing is influential, 
stable, and secure. A limited monarchy with no 
limiting element of power and influence standing in 
the social body between the monarch and the people, 
keeping each in its place, can only be a constitution 
on paper, and not a working reality. A military 
autocracy is the only government applicable, or per- 
haps possible, in this social state of agrarian equality. 
The general distribution of landed property in small 
estates is attended by another social disadvantage. 
It throws loose upon a country a vast proportion of 
the population, clamorous for war, fit only for military 
service, and to whom war is a necessity, for war only 
can give them suitable and beneficial employment. 
This, I am aware, is a very different conclusion from 
that to which Mr. Cobden and many other able and 
philanthropic observers, members of the peace con- 
gress, have come to, on the same subject. They con- 
sider war as an evil which will be speedily abolished 

ii 4 



104 ELEMENT OF PEEPETUAL WARFARE 

in modern society, by that very distribution and dif- 
fusion of landed property which I consider a perma- 
nent element of warfare in the new state of the 
European people. They suppose that war never can 
be the choice of a people generally possessed of pro- 
perty, and having a preponderating influence and 
voice in their own public affairs ; because property, 
especially landed property, which cannot be removed 
or concealed, suffers in war equally from friend and 
foe, by taxation or devastation ; and where the great 
mass of the population are landed proprietors, having 
this obvious interest in avoiding war, the most self- 
willed government must be constrained, they conceive, 
to maintain peace. If Mr. Cobden and the many ex- 
cellent men who fondly cherish this hope, would ex- 
amine more closely the actual practical working of 
the small estate system of land-occupancy in France, 
where they were recently assembled in their peace con- 
gress, they would see that, in almost every peasant-pro- 
prietor's family, there are one or two grown-up } 7 oung 
men, the sons and heirs of the labouring proprietor, 
who have no employment at home until the small 
estate becomes vacant by the death of their parents. 
Their additional labour is not required for its cultiva- 
tion, while the parent is able to work, and it cannot 
afford them bread, after they are grown up, for labour 
not required. It is, however, a secure living to look 
to, and to fall back upon after the parent's death. 
This mass of population includes a large proportion of 
all the youth of France and Germany, of an age and 
habits suitable for military service. In France alone, 
there are 10,282,946 landed proprietors. If we allow 
one-third of these ten millions to be heads of families 
with sons grown up, while the parent is still able to 



IN THE NEW SOCIAL STATE OF EUROPE. 105 

work, and cultivate his little property, what a vast 
body of young men we find, in this social state, ever 
ready and eager for military service and warfare ! 
To learn a trade or handicraft which cannot subsist 
them until they have acquired it, and which they 
would have to abandon as soon as their little heritages 
fall to them, is by no means so suitable to their posi- 
tion in life, even in a prudential view, as to enter into 
military service in which they are fed, clothed, and 
lodged from the very first day ; are engaged for a term 
of years which they can very well spare ; and are then 
free to return to their little heritages, or to re-engage, 
according to their prospects. Military conscription 
is not an evil, not even a hardship, in a society in this 
state. The great body of landed proprietors, living 
each family on its own little farm, employing little 
manufacturing industry beyond its own fireside, buy- 
ing little, and having little to buy with, can give no 
employment to each other, or to the idle and unpro- 
vided for in the social body, as producers and con- 
sumers, in time of peace any more than in time of 
war. There is no market in this social state for the 
products of the common peaceful arts — no employ- 
ments to absorb the increase of population. War is a 
necessary sequence of the social state of those coun- 
tries in which landed property is generally, and 
almost equally, distributed — war abroad, or tumult 
and revolution at home. This is clearly shown in 
Switzerland. The Swiss youth are scattered over 
Europe and America in various temporary employ- 
ments, as servants, small traders, innkeepers, adven- 
turers ; and, except the Jews, no people are so gene- 
rally dispersed over the civilised world as the Swiss. 
Switzerland manufactures also, to no inconsiderable 



106 ELEMENT OF PERPETUAL WARFARE 

extent, for foreign markets. Yet, with all these out- 
lets and employments for her youth, Switzerland 
furnishes regiments, entirely of Swiss young men, to 
Naples, Rome, and other Italian states, and keeps, in 
reality, a very large standing army in proportion to 
her population, always on foot, but always in foreign 
pay. Military service is so suitable and congenial to 
the social state of her population of small landholders, 
that the ranks of these regiments, although serving 
abroad, are always replenished with ease ; and there 
remains always a surplus of unquiet spirits at home, 
ready, from want of other employment, to engage in 
tumult and war when the cantons quarrel among 
themselves or with the federal government. In the 
United States of America, the perpetual stream of 
emigration from the half-cleared half- cultivated land 
of the eastern states to the uncleared forests of the 
west, the wild expeditions to Texas, to Mexico, to 
California, to Cuba, the reckless spirit of enterprise 
and unprincipled adventure in the American character, 
the political bluster and agitation always on the 
boil at their own firesides, and ready to scald them- 
selves and their neighbours, may assuredly be traced 
to the same social state ; viz. a state in which tempo- 
rary employment is more suitable than steady life- 
long application to one pursuit, for the youth of a 
country in which all have a living, a station in society, 
and landed property to fall back upon, if their tempo- 
rary pursuits are not successful. The provision for 
the future falls out of their calculation in the employ- 
ment of the present. This prodigious development 
of an element of warfare in the new social state of 
Europe, may well make the observer of the spirit of 
our times pause before he admits its advantages, or 



IN THE NEW SOCIAL STATE OF EUROPE. 107 

assents to Mr. Cobden's conclusion — that universal 
and perpetual peace is a necessary result of an uni- 
versal diffusion of landed property. A more warlike 
construction of society could scarcely be devised than 
one which keeps all the agricultural youth of the 
country mobile, and independent of steady employ- 
ment for their future subsistence, and renders military 
service the most desirable occupation they can adopt, 
and the most consistent with their ultimate position 
in life. This social element, the youth of a country 
living in present idleness, yet in certainty of future 
subsistence, has, in every age and nation, and even 
in every family, impeded industry and application to 
the useful and peaceful arts, and engendered a spirit 
for temporary exertion, and a wild craving for excite- 
ment which warfare only can gratify. It filled the 
Koman legions; and, on the decay of the Roman 
empire, it covered the seas with squadrons of Saxon 
and Danish freebooters. Thrice it conquered England, 
by the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Wielded by 
Bonaparte, it conquered Europe ; and, after the 
almost total annihilation of his army of half a million 
of soldiers on the retreat from Moscow, it replaced 
that army in a few months, and enabled him to 
struggle once more for the mastery of the world on 
the field of Waterloo. If Mr. Cobden be right in 
considering the universal diffusion of landed property 
a pacific element in society, all history must be wrong. 
It is this social element that is agitating and convuls- 
ing Germany, France, Italy, and filling all the conti- 
nental cities with unemployed young men, idle half- 
educated enthusiasts, incapable of steady application 
to any handicraft, because they have a living to look 
to at last independent of present industry. This 



108 EMPLOYMENT IN THE NEW SOCIAL STATE 

class of the unemployed, and in truth the unemploy- 
able, furnishes those bands of socialists, communists, 
red republicans, clubbists, students, vagabonds who 
are wandering as military adventurers over Europe, 
from the Tiber to the Eyder ; and, like the condottieri 
of the middle ages, are ready to engage in any tumult 
or warfare. The social state from which they spring 
cannot absorb them, cannot give them full employment 
in the useful arts. Employment does not keep pace 
with the increase of population, however small, in this 
new social state ; for, as every family is producing, 
generally speaking, all it consumes by its own labour 
in the field or at the fireside, the market for the pro- 
ducts of those ordinary trades and handicrafts which 
employ the great mass of the working population in 
the old social state is limited, and is necessarily falling 
off, and not increasing with the increase of population, 
because that increase brings a diminution, not an in- 
crease, of the means to consume and give employment. 
Each family, as its numbers increase, must necessarily 
give up more and more in each succeeding generation 
the use of, and tastes for, those objects among the 
common useful arts it cannot produce at home. The 
man whose father employed the tailor and shoemaker, 
and their dependent branches of industry, can only 
afford now to wear home-made clothes and shoes, of 
home-made cloth and leather; because, although 
his means — that is, the products of his little estate 
— are the same, on an average of seasons, as in his 
father's time ; the numbers to be supported by those 
means are increased. If employment be not increas- 
ing with population, society is not in a progressive, 
or even a safe state. The unemployed class must 
necessarily increase with the division and subdivision 



NOT KEEPING PACE WITH POPULATION. 109 

of the land among small peasant-proprietors who can 
neither afford, at last, to give direct nor indirect em- 
ployment to industry. The land is soon over-stocked 
with labour born upon it, as the area or the value pos- 
sessed by each family is diminishing by partition and 
repartition, while its population is augmenting ; and the 
means to buy objects employing the industry of other 
classes of producers, must be diminishing in the hands 
of the peasant-proprietors in proportion to the increase 
of their numbers and the division of their estates. 
This appears to be the disease — this want of employ- 
ment for an increasing population — inherent in this 
small estate occupancy, or new social state into which 
the continental countries are entering. The manu- 
facturing for a foreign market cannot give that uni- 
versal employment that is diffused by a general 
consumption and demand at home, for all that labour 
and skill produce. A few articles in a few districts 
may give employment by a foreign demand for them ; 
but the employment of a whole people must depend 
upon their own home consumption. If that consump- 
tion, or home-market for the products of industry, be 
necessarily diminishing under the new social arrange- 
ment or distribution of property, and the foreign 
market closed by the competition of England and 
America, manufacturing with the advantages of 
greater capital, cheaper motive power, readier trans- 
port, and, since the abolition of the corn-laws, cheaper 
production in England, to what can the rising gene- 
ration on the Continent turn themselves, but to war- 
fare abroad or tumult and revolutions at home ? So- 
cialism, communism, equality of rights to subsist- 
ence and well-being, and all the theories, schemes, 
and secret associations to which the tumults of 1848 



110 SOCIETY IN A TRANSITION STATE. 

and 1849, on the Continent, have been ascribed, are 
not in reality causes but effects, symptoms, indica- 
tions of a diseased state of society — a state in which 
there is no sufficient employment, no circulation of 
that industry which is the life-blood of society. If 
Mr. Cobden be right in considering this social state 
pacific in its elements and tendencies, all political 
economy, as well as all history, must be wrong. 

The true balance of good and evil, between the 
former social economy of Europe and that which has 
displaced it in every country but Great Britain, can- 
not, in fact, be struck in the present age. The social 
body on the Continent is in a transition state. The 
old institutions and arrangements have withered away, 
and the new have not yet taken root and unfolded 
themselves. Feudality, aristocracy, ecclesiastical in- 
fluence among the rulers or the ruled, the hereditary 
jurisdiction of nobles, their exemptions, privileges, 
monopolies of state employments, and above all, the 
prestige which still lingered in the European mind in 
favour of nobility, clergy, and the hereditary royal 
dynasties, have been more shaken by the movements 
of 1848 and 1849, than by the French revolution. 
They have been gradually giving way since 1790, and 
can never be revived in France, and Germany. A 
social revolution has been completed by the distribu- 
tion of landed property through society, and by the 
policy of substituting functionarism for nobility, and 
the landwehr for a standing army for the support of 
the monarchical principle. This radical change in 
the elements of the social body on the Continent, has 
been accomplished, and the annihilation of the influ- 
ences which have ruled society in Germany for a thou- 
sand years, has become a great standing fact in 



SOCIETY IN A TRANSITION STATE. Ill 

European history. Old abuses cannot be removed 
without a shock to the social system, without a re- 
action which may involve a generation in the misery 
of civil war and anarchy ; and yet the ultimate results 
may be good. The Keformation was not accomplished 
until the thirty years' war had carried desolation into 
every corner of Germany, yet the progress of society 
could not be stayed, the human mind could not be 
turned back, and the Reforamtion was esbtalished. 
That Reformation of the 16th century, the change 
from the religious doctrines and forms of the Church 
of Rome to those of Luther, was but a trifling 
change for society, and for the worldly interests of 
men, compared to this great change in the structure 
and elements of society itself, which is now in progress 
on the Continent. This social reformation of the 19th 
century may, like the religious reformation of the 
16th, undergo a similar protracted struggle, yet have 
a similar termination in great social good. 



112 THE LOIRE. 



CHAP. VII. 

NOTES ON THE LOIRE — ON THE CHANGE IN THE FRENCH CHA- 
RACTER FROM GAIETY TO SERIOUSNESS — ON THE WANT OF 
SELF-GOVERNMENT. — EXTRAVAGANT SCALE OF ALL PUBLIC 
WORKS FROM THIS WANT OF CONTROL. — CENTRALISATION AND 
NON- CENTRALISATION ILLUSTRATED IN THE ROADS OF FRANCE 

AND OF ENGLAND. THE TASTE FOR DISPLAY IN THE FRENCH 

CHARACTER. — DIFFERENCE OF THE OBJECTS ON WHICH INCOME 
IS EXPENDED IN ENGLAND AND IN FRANCE. — SOCIAL EFFECTS 
OF THE DIFFERENT EXPENDITURE OF EQUAL INCOMES BY THE 

FRENCH AND ENGLISH FAMILY. THE CrVILISING INFLUENCE OF 

THE DIFFUSION OF THE USEFUL ARTS GREATER THAN OF THE 
FINE ARTS. — ON THE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE 

WITH MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY. ENCOURAGEMENT BY THE 

CONTINENTAL GOVERNMENTS OF THE MANUFACTURE OF EARTH- 
ENWARE THE EFFECTS. FRENCH CARTS. — PLOUGHS OF DIF- 
FERENT COUNTRIES. — WORKING COWS AND HEIFERS. SPADE- 
WORK COMPARED WITH PLOUGH-WORK. — VINE CULTURE. 

TOURALNE INTERESTING TO ENGLISH TRAVELLERS — HOUSES 

MANNER OF LIVING — HISTORICAL CONNECTION WITH ENGLAND. 

The Loire! the murmuring Loire! Flowery meads 
and waving groves — the pipe and tabor — the merry 
dance — the care-free laugh — the joyous lay — moon- 
light every night — whispering lovers under every 
tree — a nightingale on every bough — are not these 
the imaginations of and about the Loire that Gold- 
smith has conjured up in the fancy of every reading 
youth of sixteen? Alas! dull Mrs. Reality, in her 
every day face and check apron, sweeps away those 
gay imaginings from the poets' corner of the traveller's 
brain. The Loire, in sober verity, is the least pictu- 
resque or romantic, as well as the least useful of Eu- 



THE BANKS OF THE LOIRE. 113 

ropean rivers. It stagnates for half the year among 
beds of sand, mud, and gravel, over which it boils and 
rages the other half, a thick yellow torrent. An 
ancient embankment or wall, called the leve, 
raised along the right hand side of the stream, to pre- 
vent it from inundating the flat land behind, forms the 
bank of the Loire, and defends the low swampy 
meadows between the river channel and the higher 
ground of the side of the valley from the sand and 
gravel carried down by the torrent in winter. The 
land on the left side of the river channel has not been 
thought worth defending, and the water has leave to 
cover it with sand and rubbish in the floods, and to 
stagnate in pools between the sand banks in the dry 
season. To avoid ague the country people have housed 
themselves generally upon the heights of the clay or 
chalk ridge which forms the right hand side of the 
river valley, and where the ridge is steep, and rises in 
upright cliffs at the upper edge, habitations have been 
excavated in the soft rock, in old times, and still serve 
as dwellings — perhaps the most ancient in Europe. 
The land beyond the alluvial soil of the river valley, 
is generally a thin hungry sand, and gravel, on which 
a natural green sward of grass i s a stranger. Bush 
and hard spikes of shrubs thinly bristling up through 
the brown surface of the soil, are the natural growth 
of the country above the level of the inundations of 
the river. The two most common and extensive 
natural coverings of the land in the island of Great 
Britain, heather in the north, and grass in the south, 
are very uncommon on the Continent. A hundred 
acres together of the fine natural grass of an English 
park, or of the purple blooming knee-deep heather of 
a Scotch hill-side, would probably not be found on 

i 



114 GAIETY NOT THE PRESENT CHARACTERISTIC 

any line from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The pea- 
santry in this part of France are an under-sized black- 
haired ugly variety of the southern race of the 
European people. Their brown skins, stretched by 
premature toil, hang loose and in wrinkles about their 
small bones, as if too wide for the frame-work they 
cover. The woman of thirty looks three score. 
Gaiety ! — Gaiety is not at home on the banks of the 
Loire in our generation. The possession of property 
has sobered the French character, and brought into it 
the serious thoughtful reflective spirit which belongs 
to the proprietor. Who are the gay ? The slave and 
the servant are gay. The soldier and the sailor are gay. 
All men are gay, who are free from moral and social re- 
sponsibilities, and from the duties, cares, and interests 
of property : but this gaiety which, as we learn from 
travellers, was peculiarly characteristic of the French 
peasantry of the generation preceding the revolution, 
and which is certainly not so now, is not the indica- 
tion of a high social condition. The negro slave and 
the child are the gayest of human beings ; but arc 
they in the highest and happiest state human nature 
can attain to, because they are thoughtless, reckless, 
care-free, and gay ? There appears to be some con- 
nection even between gaiety and a low, non-intellec- 
tual, oppressed life — between the carnivals, holidays, 
wakes, popular games, public amusements, and such 
gay doings, which some well meaning people would 
be glad to see revived among us as tokens of a happy 
state of society — and a very low and debased social 
condition. In the countries and ages, at least, in 
which these have nourished the most, the people have, 
at the same time, been in the most degraded state, 
without property, industry, or freedom. England 
was merry England when the people were serfs, 



OF THE PEASANT-PROPRIETOR IN FRANCE. 115 

butchering each other in the wars of the Roses, at the 
command of their nobles. The Scotch were a gay- 
dancing tuneful people, while they were cattle- stealing 
clansmen. When they became cattle-owning drovers 
of their own four-footed property, their merriment 
gradually died away before the cares and considera- 
tions of a money-making peaceful life. The Italians, 
the French of the age of Louis XI V., and, at the 
present day, the poorest, least industrious, and most 
oppressed of the cities and countries on the Continent, 
abound most in festivals, public places of amusement, 
concerts, balls, and all the indications of a light- 
hearted gaiety; and just in proportion to their poverty, 
idleness, and want of civil and political freedom. The 
possession of property has made the French peasant- 
proprietor a man of grave and serious deportment. 
Frivolity, carelessness, and gaiety are no longer his 
national characteristics. 

Here in France, where government controls all 
private enterprise and action, centralises in its bureaux 
all that directly or indirectly concerns the public, and 
plans and executes all public works upon its own 
judgment and by its own functionaries, not leaving 
any thing to be executed by the judgment and agency 
of the public itself and of those locally interested in 
the work, the traveller finds a remarkable dispro- 
portion between the value and importance of the 
object to be attained and the cost of attaining it. 
This is perhaps the first observation he makes when 
he steps on shore at the quay of Calais, takes a walk 
down its magnificent wooden jetty — one of the 
greatest wooden structures of its kind, of our times — 
and then walks round the harbour and sees the trifling 

i 2 



116 EXTRAVAGANCE IN PUBLIC WORKS FROM 

amount of trade, the paltry muster of fishing -boats 
and coasting-vessels, for which this magnificent work 
has been constructed. He is strongly impressed with 
the disproportion between the means and the end. In 
France, Germany, and over all the Continent, what- 
ever may be the form of government, the spirit of 
self-government is equally dormant among the people. 
It is the state that does every thing, whether in form 
this state-power be constitutional or autocratic. The 
state alone plans and executes all works of general or 
local interests, by its own functionaries, and inde- 
pendently of the judgment of those locally interested. 
Roads, canals, bridges, quays, and public buildings, 
are consequently constructed, not in a commensurate 
and due proportion in extent and expense to the 
want to be provided for, but upon a disproportionate 
scale, and for some imaginary and exaggerated future 
state of things, and with an excess of magnificence 
and expenditure ridiculously in contrast with the 
small importance of the object, and the actual or 
possible wants of the community and locality. This 
extravagance disables the governments from accom- 
plishing other as necessary works, in a useful way, 
and accounts for the incongruities of stately buildings 
and public works standing empty, or unused, or half- 
finished, and all around them in neglect and ruin. 
The means of a country, like those of an individual, 
may be misapplied and wasted upon the most useful 
undertakings, as well as upon the most useless, if no 
proportion be observed between the expense of at- 
taining the object and its value when attained. 
This disproportion between cost and advantage to the 
public, is the great characteristic of all public works 
in all states in which the people have no control or 



WANT OF PUBLIC CONTROL AND SELF-GOVERNMENT. 117 

voice in the management of their own affairs. It is 
the architectural style of despotism. The high roads 
of France, running in straight lines from the metro- 
polis to the distant provincial chief towns, like rays 
from a common centre, are among the most magni- 
ficent public works in Europe. They are paved in 
the middle like streets, have summer roads on each 
side of this causeway on the softer ground, are of an 
imposing breadth, are bordered on each side with 
formal rows of poplar trees, and are very grand, but 
very tiresome avenues from town to town. These 
magnificent spacious paved high roads have proved 
very costly to France — costly in the time, labour, 
and prosperity of the country population, recklessly 
expended in constructing them on so extravagant a 
scale — costly to the government that constructed 
them, for they cost the elder branch of the Bourbons 
the throne of France. It was the corvees, or forced 
labour of the peasants, without any allowance of 
wages or food, applied to the construction of these 
magnificent roads, which was the great grievance 
that alienated the agricultural class from the monarchy, 
and mainly led to the French revolution. This ex- 
travagant tyrannical expenditure of their time and 
labour, abstracted from productive employment, and 
applied to these roads, useful, no doubt, as all roads 
are, but not necessary on a scale of such great magni- 
ficence, was a never ending impoverishing employ- 
ment of the whole population, generation after gene- 
ration, without any proportionate advantage. 

In England road-making began to be attended to 
in the same age ; but it was the private interest of the 
public, as it may be called, that was the road-maker- 
general — the judge-general of the necessity, expe- 



118 ENGLISH ROADS FRENCH ROADS. 

diency, and scale of the road — the planner, under- 
taker, executor, and paymaster of the work. The 
legislature had, no doubt, to sanction the taking of 
land, the levying of tolls, and other rights which the 
private parties or local interests required for enabling 
their road-trustees to act ; but the government had 
nothing to do with the plan, funds, or execution. 
There was no branch of the Home Office like the 
" Department des Ponts et Chaussees" in France, 
whose officials alone could plan and execute all road- 
undertakings. There was no general tax, like the 
heavy and odious chaussee tax, converted, in 1804, 
along with the tobacco and licence duties, into the 
hated droits reunis. It is curious to see what, in 
about a century and a half, has been the difference of 
the results in the two countries — the difference be- 
tween the centralisation of the funds, management, 
and execution of all roads, bridges, and public works, 
in the hands of a board or department of the state 
employing officials of the highest skill and scientific 
attainments, men bred regularly for the duties of 
this department — and the non-centralisation of this 
great and all-important national business, the leav- 
ing it to the public to plan, execute, and manage for 
themselves, through their own trustees and under- 
takers, and under their own control, what, in each 
county or locality, was considered useful, necessary, 
or beneficial, without interference or superintendence 
at all by any government-functionary. The question 
of centralisation or non-centralisation is here brought 
to the test of experience. In 1828, Count Mole and 
Baron Pasquier state, in a Report upon the roads of 
France, made by order of government (the latest I 
have access to), that the highways used, or to be 



CENTRALISATION NON-CENTRALISATION. 119 

opened, extend to 8584 leagues; and of these, 3572 
leagues only, or less than one half, are in a state of 
good repair, 3582 leagues are in a state of dilapida- 
tion, and 365 leagues are not opened ; and, besides 
the yearly repairs, it would require 198 millions of 
francs (about eight millions of pounds sterling) to 
restore and complete the main lines of communication 
called royal roads, or national highways, in France. 
This is not the state of our roads in Great Britain, 
under our non-centralisation system. Instead of 3572 
leagues, or 10,716 miles of road in good repair, 
England and Wales alone, according to a Report 
made to parliament in 1848, have 22,382 miles 3 
furlongs of turnpike roads, besides the parish roads 
not under turnpike-trust management ; and this is in 
an area computed by geographers at 58,335 square 
miles, the roads of Scotland not being included in the 
Report : while France, with an area of 148,840 square 
miles, has but 10,716 miles of good roads. The island, 
in fact, is covered with a network of roads and cross- 
roads, the best in the world, constructed by the public 
in each locality for themselves, by their own local, 
county, or parish authorities and trustees, according 
to their own knowledge of the wants of each locality, 
paid for by their own rates and turnpike tolls, and 
with no such interference, superintendence, manage- 
ment, or execution by any department of government 
through its functionaries, as on the Continent. The 
funds also are raised from those who use or are bene- 
fited by the roads; and, not passing through the 
hands of government, cannot be alienated or with- 
held, in times of pressure upon the Exchequer, for 
other national requirements. According to Montes- 
quiou's Report, in 1814, a sum of fifteen and a half 



120 ENGLISH ROADS — FRENCH ROADS. 

millions of francs voted for roads was applied to mili- 
tary uses under Napoleon's government. It is not to 
be denied that, under the English system of non- 
centralisation and non-interference of government, 
one square mile in England contains, on an average, 
a greater number of good roads than any ten in 
France or Germany, and with more traffic on them. 
France has, no doubt, some very superb main roads 
from the metropolis to the capital provincial cities ; 
but these are good and well maintained only for a few 
leagues beyond the barriers of each town, and only 
on the routes on which the mail-coaches, the military, 
the public functionaries, and the travellers en poste 
usually pass. The cross-country roads, the side com- 
munications with the grande chaussee, the cart-roads, 
all the feeders of the stream of industry which facility 
of transport from place to place pours out over a land, 
are in a wretched state in France and Germany, even 
in the vicinity of important cities. The difference 
between the two systems — the continental system of 
government doing every thing, and centralising all 
public interests in its own management, and our old 
system of leaving the public to manage their own 
interests by themselves, and through their own local 
institutions, without interference of government, un- 
less in the rare exceptional cases in which private 
interests acting detrimentally to the public advantage, 
are not opposed and checked by other private inter- 
ests — is brought out strongly by the results of the two 
systems in that primary step to all improvement, the 
road-making through a country. 

The taste for display appears to have worked down- 
wards in France, from the government to the governed, 



THE TASTE FOR DISPLAY. 121 

or else to be some original and natural bias of mind 
common to the people and their rulers. It enters 
largely into the character of the French nation. As 
in the public works, such as roads, quays, buildings, 
there is a ridiculous disproportion between the mag- 
nificent construction, and the ordinary end to be at- 
tained, so in private life the traveller is struck by a 
similar disproportion between the display of elegance 
and luxury in some things, and the obvious want of 
comfort and accommodation in others. There is, at 
least to English taste, feelings, and notions of the 
suitable and comfortable in household life, an absurd 
incongruity between elegant silk curtain draperies in 
the windows, rich and beautiful paper on the walls, 
velvet -seated chairs, gilt stools, sofas, and ottomans of 
classic forms, mirrors of vast size, splendid and costly 
ornaments of porcelain in profusion, and with these, 
cold, raw, brick or stone or wooden floors and stair- 
cases, without carpets ; the doors and window cases 
rudely finished, door locks, handles, hinges, rough, 
unpolished, and clumsy ; poor coarse earthenware for 
the bedrooms, and in very scanty supply ; wretched 
table knives, and not enough of them at table ; and in 
every article of daily domestic use, a want of the 
abundance, neatness, and polish, we require about us 
in our ordinary households. The taste for effect, for 
appearance, elegance, and show, has outstripped the 
taste for utility, substantiality, and comfort, in the 
civilisation of the French people. This taste or spirit 
affects materially the national wealth and industry of 
France. In England, a man of the middle, or even 
of the lower class employs, with his taste for the 
useful and the comfortable, a great deal more of the 
industry of others, is a much better customer in the 



122 EXPENDITURE OF INCOME IN ENGLISH 

markets of his country, sets a-going much more labour 
and skill to supply his multifarious wants, than the 
French or other continental man of equal income, 
with his more refined taste for the elegant and showy. 
Our middle class householder will have of household 
goods about him, carpets, mahogany chairs, tables, 
chests of drawers, curtained beds, washhand stands, 
crockeryware in abundance, and good cutleryware ; 
and in his stock of wearing apparel, shirts, drawers, 
stockings, handkerchiefs, and such articles, whether 
seen or unseen, in comfortable plenty. The con- 
tinental man, of the same middle class and means, 
will often be deficient in a good stock of the unseen 
habiliments, but will have a shirt pin, a chain, a ring, 
of quite as much value as all the articles of an En- 
glishman's wardrobe put together. In his dwelling 
there may be a distressing deficiency of washhand 
basons, ewers, chamber-pots, mugs, bowls, dishes, but 
there will be an elegant vase or ornament of porcelain, 
which has cost as much as all that we miss of earth- 
enware for use and comfort would have done. The 
amount expended by each of these two middle-class 
men may be the same, but the amount of industry set 
to work to gratify the homely taste of the English 
middle-class man for the useful and comfortable, is 
Very much greater and more diffused in the labour 
market, than the amount employed in gratifying the 
more refined taste of the French middle-class man for 
the one or two costly articles of show and elegance 
that he prefers. Suppose an English country town 
suddenly transformed, by the stroke of a magician's 
wand, into a French or German town of the same 
population, and the same income of the upper class of 
inhabitants. Two-thirds of the tradesmen, shop- 



AND FRENCH HOUSEHOLDS COMPARED. 123 

keepers, artisans, and labourers, who lived by sup- 
plying the English population with the multifarious 
articles of common handicraft industry it required, 
would be thrown out of work and bread, from the want 
of consumption, and demand for such articles among 
the French or German population ; and yet the amount 
of income expended yearly by each population might 
be the same. It is the diffusion of the expenditure, 
the employment given by it to ordinary labour and 
handicraft work, that would be different. The innu- 
merable articles for comfort and convenience, in which 
the income of the English family of ordinary means 
and station is expended, would be represented in the 
French or German family of the same means and 
station, by a few more costly and elegant articles of a 
higher taste and art, but employing a comparatively 
small number of workmen to produce them. It is 
this general diffusion of the expenditure of income in 
England among all classes of the working community, 
instead of the expenditure being compressed into a 
few objects of luxury and taste, produced by a small 
number of superior artists, and the daily return of the 
English expenditure for a new supply of the common 
articles it is laid out upon for domestic use, while the 
return for the more costly articles of show or taste is 
seldom oftener than once in a year, or even once in a 
lifetime, that knits together our lower and upper 
classes, our employed and employers, more closely 
than on the Continent. The very lowest labourer or 
handicraftsman knows that he lives by the prosperity 
and daily expenditure of his employers — by their 
custom, as he calls it, in his trade ; and he has a 
common interest and a regular intercourse with his 
customers. The operatives employed in the pro- 



124 EXPENDITURE IN OBJECTS OF COMFORT 

duction of articles of luxury only required at distant 
intervals by any customers, the jewellers, watch- 
makers, coachmakers, trinketmakers, bronze ornament 
makers, who in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, were in 
1848 the principal agitators, and were, in reality, the 
masters of the government, would make a small figure 
in any English city, compared to the vast body of 
common tradesmen interested, as much as their daily 
customers, in putting clown all disturbance dangerous 
to property, peace, and their own daily living by the 
exercise of their trades. The simplicity, or, as some 
may call it, the vulgarity of the taste of the English 
people, which will rather have a heap of well-finished 
comfortable articles about them in the kitchen, par- 
lour, and bedroom, than a mirror, a statue, a porcelain 
vase, or an or-moulu clock of the same value, on the 
chimney-piece of the drawing-room, is a very con- 
servative taste for the country. It gives employment 
that unites the lower classes of society, the common 
labourer, the operative artisan or handicraftsman in 
the most ordinary trades, with the upper or capitalist 
classes, by the direct ties of mutual wants, common 
interests, and habits of frequent, or almost daily, per- 
sonal intercourse, as employers and employed, in pro- 
ducing, altering, replacing the innumerable articles 
with which the English family surrounds itself. The 
superfluity of ingenious articles of admirable work- 
manship for the most ordinary household purposes, 
which fills every corner of an English dwelling, 
surprises the foreign traveller, and is one of the most 
characteristic features of English domestic life. 

A people are civilised, not by means of or in pro- 
portion to the diffusion among them of the tastes and 
feelings for the fine arts, not by their cultivation of the 



AND ON OBJECTS OF FINE ART SOCIAL EFFECTS. 125 

aesthetic, but by the diffusion of the desire for, and en- 
joyment of the vulgar physical gratifications, conve- 
niences, and comforts produced by the ordinary useful 
arts, and which money can procure in every inhabited 
locality. The money is procured by the exercise of 
those very arts ; and by industry, integrity, good 
conduct, and exertion of mind and body applied to 
their production. What employs the industry and 
ingenuity of the many, is of more civilising influence 
in society than what only employs the genius of the 
few ; and on this account, the civilisation and well- 
being of a people depend more on the use and outlay 
than on the amount of their wealth. A half-naked 
African girl carries more wealth in the gold and 
jewels of her earrings and bracelets, than a well- 
dressed lady, with us, expends in the various articles 
of her equipment, which, from her straw bonnet and 
ribbons to her kid-skin or satin shoes, employ such a 
countless variety of trades and branches of industry. 
Where a people, or a class, such as the peasant-pro- 
prietors in the countries in which the distribution of 
land in small estates is of very ancient standing, 
have much wealth locked up in gold and silver orna- 
ments, it is both a sign and a cause of a low non- 
progressive social condition. In Turkey, in Russia, 
and over all the East, much wealth is yearly invested 
and locked up in this unproductive way, while the 
owners live in a rude state without many of the 
most essential gratifications of civilised life. The 
same tendency, without the same excuse of the in- 
security of property, is • observable in the boors of 
North Holland, and in all the peasant -proprietors 
from the Eyder to the Scheld. In France and Ger- 
many, even among the highest and wealthiest, a few 



126 EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT ENCOURAGEMENT 

costly articles of the highest taste and finish, standing 
in bare comfortless half-furnished houses, do not 
represent or promote so much employment and well- 
being among the mass of the people, as the thousands 
of articles of very inferior price produced by the 
co-operative industry of tens of thousands of trades- 
men, which the mistress of an English house, in the 
middle class of society, crams into her rooms from 
the scullery to the garret. 

The effect of government interference with manu- 
facturing industry in the useful arts, by a well- 
intended encouragement and patronage, is curiously 
illustrated in the fabrication of earthenware, — in the 
pottery of France. No art contributes more to the 
comfort and enjoyment of life among the middle 
and lower classes, than that of fabricating good and 
cheap earthenware. We see in England, in passing 
every cottage, in what estimation good earthenware 
is held by the lower classes, from the rows of plates 
and dishes which adorn the shelf over the chimney- 
piece, in the poorest habitation of the labouring man. 
It is always the first outlay of his wife, in objects of 
comfort in their living. In France, in Louis XIV. 's 
time, the government encouraged, patronised, and 
carried on upon its own account, the manufacture of 
earthenware, in order to introduce a finer quality and 
better taste, and to extend the fabrication of pottery 
as a great branch of national industry. The under- 
taking was successful, and no English manufacturers 
could pretend to vie with the taste, beauty, and fine 
quality of the porcelain of the royal manufactory at 
Sevres. But what, in the course of time, has been 
the result ? The French government succeeded in 



IN THE MANUFACTURE OF EARTHENWARE. 127 

giving the people a taste for, and a supply of, the 
ornamental and costly, but not of the useful, cheap, 
and comfortable in earthenware. Their ordinary 
every-day pottery is clumsy, heavy, ill-made, and 
scanty. A tradesman with us has, in proportion to 
the number in his family, a supply of plates, dishes, 
bowls, basins, pitchers, cups, saucers, and such earth- 
enware, of superior quality and in greater abundance, 
than you find in elegantly furnished hotels, or in 
the dwellings of wealthy families especially in the 
country, and the country towns. All the continental 
sovereigns, in imitation of Louis XIV., became ma- 
nufacturers of porcelain by way of encouraging the 
manufacture, and they encouraged it all away. Ber- 
lin, Dresden, even Copenhagen, and Stockholm, had 
their royal pottery works, in which, as might be 
expected, the improvement and cheap production of 
ordinary household articles were not the objects, but 
the good taste, fine quality, elegance, and execution 
of ornamental wares. Instead of rising as this manu- 
facture, left to itself, has done in England, to be one 
of the most important branches of national industry, 
a source of great trade, employment, and wealth, and 
of great comfort to the people, the earthenware ma- 
nufacture in France, Saxony, and Prussia, languishes 
in its costly magnificence, and has never recovered 
the government-nursing. In Paris, Berlin, or Dresden, 
you may buy an ornamental vase for your drawing- 
room table, or chimney-piece, beautiful to behold, and 
well worth the ten or twelve sovereigns it may cost 
you, as a work of fine art; but you find it difficult to 
lay out the same money to your satisfaction in earth- 
enware for your bedrooms, dining-room, and kitchen, 



128 FRENCH CARTS. 

that is not, if compared to English earthenware for 
the same uses, coarse, heavy, clumsy, and dear. 

We are so accustomed in Britain to have every 
thing we use produced for us by combinations of 
skill, capital, and art applied to the particular object 
only, and produced consequently in the utmost per- 
fection and neatness of workmanship, that we scarcely 
know how the same end may be attained with imple- 
ments, processes, or means much more rude and 
simple. We are apt to look with contempt at the 
implements or means with which the unaided work- 
man labours in other countries, and we can scarcely 
believe that the work may be done, and sometimes 
done as well and effectually, by the simpler and 
cheaper, as by the more artificial and expensive means. 
This observation is d propos of French carts, which I 
have been examining with some attention. A French 
cart ! what can be more paltry and contemptible ? 
An English broad- wheeled waggon is to a French 
cart, the cupola of St. Paul's to a hencoop, and the 
value or cost is almost in the same proportion. The 
Scotch farm cart even, with its framing, dovetailing, 
and iron work, its flaring light-blue body and bright 
red shafts and wheels, and its cost, 16/. or 1 8/., is a 
magnificent machine compared to the French ; yet, 
what is it to the English waggon, costing from 80/. 
to 120/., in its full vehicular grandeur ? Yet, there 
must be some good points too about the French cart. 
Some few of the present generation may have a slight 
recollection, that French carts have, in the course of 
the present century, visited almost every metropolis, 
rolled on the pavement of almost every town or city 
of the Continent, have made their way over the 



FRENCH CARTS. 129 

roughest of mountain roads in Switzerland, Spain, 
and Portugal, and through the deepest of miry roads 
in Holland, Germany, and Poland. The traveller, 
too, will observe that cartage must be to France 
what coasting-trade is to England — the principal 
mode of transporting the bulky or heavy products of 
one part of the country to another. Canals, or river 
communications, are scarce in proportion to the ex- 
tent of the country. Seaports are far apart, and in 
general only connected with the interior of the 
country by cartage. If the roads are bad, the carts 
must be good to travel on them. The French ought 
certainly to understand something about carts ; and 
the traveller of any spirit of observation will not be 
content with his first impression, that they are paltry 
inferior machines, but will endeavour to find out 
what good may be about them. 

In French ideas, two good high wheels and a stout 
iron axle are the only essential parts of a cart. All 
the rest cannot be too rough, cheap, and readily 
replaced. Two long spars laid across an iron axle 
and bolted into it, are the shafts and body ; a few 
loose boards are the bottom ; and a few upright sticks 
stuck into the spars with some loose side boards, and 
all moveable, form the sides, back, and front, for 
keeping the load in its place. A man who can handle 
an axe, could cut and fit up the whole out of the 
next hedge, in an hour or two, excepting the wheels 
and axle. The French wheels are remarkably strong 
and well made. Wheelwright work is, perhaps, the 
only kind of woodwork that is executed as substan- 
tially and neatly as with us. The wheels are of a 
larger diameter in common carts and waggons than 
we use. There is some reason or rule for it. The 



130 FRENCH HARNESS. 

centre of gravity of the cart is the centre of the axle, 
the centre of moving power is the breast or shoulder 
of the horse, and the horizontal line between the two 
is the shortest and most favourable line of draught. 
The height, therefore, of the centre of the axle from 
the ground should be equal to the height of the 
horse's shoulder or point of draught, and to obtain 
this favourable line of draught, the French wheels 
are generally made of larger diameter than ours, 
although their draught horses are not taller, perhaps 
not so tall on an average, as our breed. The harness 
is on the same principle as the cart. What is cheapest 
and most easily made and mended, is deemed the 
best. There is good sense in this. The traces, even 
to post-horses, are nothing but pieces of white rope ; 
and what we call simmet, or platted flat white rope, 
supplies all the straps of shining black leather with 
brass buckles, which constitute a set of harness in 
our horse equipment. If any thing is too long or 
too short, or gives way, knotting, splicing, and sacre- 
ing, put all to rights in a few minutes. The collars 
alone are of leather. The turn out is certainly 
beggarly in appearance, and so universal in France, 
that it stands in page the first of the note-book of 
every tourist, and satisfies all young lady or gen- 
tleman travellers, in the first half league of their 
travels, of the prodigious inferiority of the French 
people in civilisation, as even their private carriages 
and post chaises are yoked with ropes. But it is 
ridiculous too, we must allow, with our expensive 
carts and harness, to see a carter or ploughman un- 
yoking his team, and losing half a day's work in 
going to the cartwright or harness maker, to get a 
staple or chain, or board in his dovetailed cartbox 



PLOUGHS OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. 131 

repaired, or to get the tongue of a buckle in the 
harness replaced or mended, when a hammer and 
nail, or a knot or splice could, in the more simple 
French cart and its outfit, repair the damage on the 
spot, in a few minutes, and make the whole as good 
as ever. Brass-mounted harness, shining leather 
straps, quilted leather traces and thongs, and all the 
tinkling glories of a crack English team, are no 
doubt, very pretty to look at ; but they are always 
followed, about Christmas, by a bit of paper not quite 
so agreeable to the farmer's eye ; the account of the 
harness maker, sadler, cartwright, and smith. Five 
shillings would probably buy all the gear, excepting 
the collar, of any cart or post-horse fully accoutred 
for draught, even in the coach work, in France ; and 
where there are no buckles, a knot is the legitimate 
mode of repair, and a knot costs nothing. There is 
very little of the ridiculous in this simplicity of outfit 
after all ; since it is undeniably effective, cheaper, and 
more readily repaired, or replaced on the spot, in 
case of breakage, than our more costly and splendid 
carts and harness. 

The ploughs of different countries or districts, 
however much they differ in construction, weight, 
length, or in accessories of wheels and shares of 
various forms, may all be classed into two di- 
visions, working on two distinct principles of hus- 
bandry. The Scotch plough, with all the variations 
and improvements of it, works upon the principle 
and for the purpose of cleaving and turning up the 
soil. The Kentish or turn wrist plough, and all 
ploughs on the Continent, have an additional purpose, 
and work on another principle of farming ; viz., that 
of preserving a bed, sole, or floor, at a certain depth, 

K 2 



132 PLOUGHS OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. 

and stirring and turning only the soil above this 
floor, and never breaking into it. One will have a 
clear idea of this principle and of the state of the old 
arable land of the Continent, by supposing an earthen 
barn-floor, firm and hard, and a bed of fertile mould 
of sufficient depth for vegetation laid upon it. The 
object of the construction of all the continental 
ploughs, and of the old Kentish plough, is to form 
and consolidate this floor, and to stir and turn only 
the bed of mould resting upon it, and which contains 
all the manure, but to avoid rending the floor itself 
and mixing it with the upper fertilised stratum. The 
object, again, of the construction of the Scotch plough, 
and of the class to which it belongs, is to deepen the 
soil without regard to this floor, and to mix and 
fertilise the upper and lower strata together. Which 
is better would be an idle question, as the nature of 
the soil and subsoil, the natural and artificial drainage 
of the land, the kind of manure and the command of 
it, the strength of the working stock, and even the 
length of lease, may make the one system more 
eligible than the other and the best for the circum- 
stances. The countries and districts of oldest cul- 
tivation, both abroad and in England, appear in 
general to be cultivated on the principle of preserving 
intact the floor, bed, or pan as it is called in Norfolk, 
on which the vegetable soil rests, and their ploughs, 
whatever variations may be found in the form, have 
a foot or block of wood, below which the proscissory 
parts of the implement do not work, and the depth 
at which the earth is to be stirred is regulated by 
an adjustment of the beam on two wheels, or by 
some equivalent check upon the ploughman going 
too deep and tearing up the bed. It may be that 
the want of strength of working horses and gear, in 



WORKING OXEN, COWS, AND HEIFERS. 133 

old times, rendered this practice in husbandry uni- 
versal in Europe; but the principle appears to be 
approved of at the present day in Norfolk, Essex, 
Kent, Surrey, and some other of the best-farmed 
districts of England, in which the ploughs are all of 
the construction which cannot stir the earth at an 
unequal or uncertain depth, and by which the pan 
or bed on which the cultivated fertilised soil rests, 
cannot be raised or broken. 

A single-horse plough, with shafts like those of a 
gig instead of traces, is used on the Continent in 
forming drills. Whether shafts or traces be the better 
working-gear for horses is still undecided, I believe, 
by practical farmers ; but shafts are generally used 
now in the horse artillery of most countries, which is 
a presumptive proof of some superiority. 

All over France and Germany, especially in the 
valley of the Rhine, a great deal of the agricultural 
labour, probably more than one-half of it, is done by 
oxen or heifers, not by horses. It is not at all un- 
common to see three-year-old heifers, and even milk- 
ing cows, in the yoke; and cows not in milk are 
worked regularly. The female cattle step out more 
nimbly than oxen, in the cart or plough. The slow 
pace of oxen makes them, as working stock, unsuit- 
able on our large farms, on which a great deal of 
work, in spring and autumn, must be got through 
expeditiously ; and many farmers in our improved 
districts never probably saw a yoke of oxen. A long 
team of five horses on end, in Kent, in the deep clay 
soils, makes very little more speed with the Kentish 
turnwrist plough, than a pair of oxen on the Con- 
tinent in a similar stiff clay soil would do; but oxen 



134 WORKING-CATTLE AND 

are generally given up, as working stock, by all intel- 
ligent farmers with us. On the small farms of peasant 
proprietors on the Continent, they, are, however, not 
so unsuitable. The climate is not so pressing on the 
proprietor ; rye, also, which is the main crop and 
principal bread-corn of the Continent, is much earlier 
•ripe than wheat or barley, and is harvested in July, 
before the autumn weather sets in with its wind and 
rain. The cost of keeping horses is willingly saved 
on these small farms, at the expense of additional 
time and much hard work with the spade. The most 
suitable way of yoking cattle seems better under- 
stood, and the ease and freedom of the animal in the 
yoke more considered than with us, in the best dis- 
tricts in which oxen are still used for draught. As 
cattle will not bear any weight on the back or shoul- 
ders, the oxen carts on the Continent, in general, are 
four-wheeled, with shafts for one or for two oxen 
abreast, and they draw by their foreheads. A piece 
of wood close behind the roots of the horns, hollowed 
out to fit the rise and shape of the neck at its junction 
with the head, is strapped on by a strong leathern 
thong, to a pad across the forehead in front of the 
horns. The light wooden shafts of the four-wheeled 
cart or waggon are either connected by thongs with 
this head-gear, or being bent inwards considerably, 
their ends pass through holes made to receive them 
in the wings of the piece of wood across the neck. 
The animal yoked in this way steps out at a pace that 
shows he is much more comfortable, and more free 
and at his ease in his motions, than in our old, pain- 
ful, and barbarous way of yoking oxen with a heavy 
beam of wood resting on their necks, and sustaining 
the weight of the load in a two- wheeled cart, and with 



WORKING-HORSES COMPARED. 135 

iron bows which gall their skins, to draw by from the 
shoulders. The strength of the ox is in the neck and 
forehead, not in the shoulder. In ploughing, harrow- 
ing, and carting light loads, cows and heifers are used 
as freely as we would mares. It would, no doubt, be 
ridiculous on a large Scotch or English farm to use 
cattle, especially cows and heifers, in farm work. But 
things are ridiculous only when they are not adapted 
to their ends. Cattle are not adapted to the despatch 
and economy of time necessary on a large farm worked 
with hired labourers and servants. The case is very 
different on a small farm worked by the peasant-pro- 
prietor's own family, whose time is not valued, at 
least not paid for in money, and is not convertible 
into money where there is no demand for hired 
labour. On such small farms the keeping of horses 
may, from the small extent of land, be unsuitable or 
perhaps impracticable, and the keeping of cows or 
oxen profitable. Circumstances of situation, soil, work 
to be done, state of roads, and many other consi- 
derations, may turn the scale, even on larger farms, 
in favour of working cattle instead of horses, without 
any thing ridiculous in the practice. A man who is 
owner of the land he works on, is not under the same 
necessity of getting through his work so speedily as 
the man who has to hire labour ; and on such little 
farms on the Continent, the cattle and the spade do 
the work. The cow or heifer eats, therefore it is not 
at all ridiculous to make her work ; and the harrow- 
ing, ploughing between furrows, and such light work, 
may be done well with the female cattle. They are 
much more handy to manage and quicker in pace, 
than oxen. 



K 4 



136 SPADE HUSBANDRY. 

The small farmer on the Continent does much with 
the spade. A very large proportion — perhaps the 
largest proportion — of the land of France if we in- 
clude the vine culture, is under spade husbandry. 
For turning, dividing, and mixing the soil, the spade 
is a more efficient instrument than the plough : the 
work is done better, but not so expeditiously. In 
America the emigrant must begin with spade hus- 
bandry, however large his lot of uncleared uncul- 
tivated land may be. The spade is quite expeditious 
enough to keep up with the axe in the forest. It is a 
matter of some importance, therefore, to know what 
spade work can do in producing food enough from the 
land to support the emigrant's family, until he has 
cleared an arable area to keep a cattle stock, or horses, 
for ploughing and harrowing. Some information on 
the subject may not be unacceptable to many. 

An English acre contains 4840 square yards, or 
43,560 square feet, and is equal to 1135 square toises, 
Paris measure. The French acre, Paris measure, is 
900 square toises. Now, it was found by experiments 
in France that, taking an average of men and soils, a 
man digs in 10 days 256 square toises of land, or 
something more than l-5th and less than l-4th of an 
acre. This was close work ; so that l-5th is probably 
as much as could be done. Now, a family of 3 
working persons would dig 7 acres, supposing it all 
clear of bushes and roots, in 116 or 117 days. The 
7 acres, supposing the soil poor but improveable, 
could scarcely be expected to yield above 4 returns 
and the seed, or about 28 bolls of meal. Part of the 
land dug may be occupied with potatoes or other 
crops, and the labour is thereby divided according to 
the suitable seasons for planting or sowing them, and 



SPADE HUSBANDEY. 137 

the kinds of food diversified ; but the total quantity 
of food raised the first year will probably not differ 
much from this normal production of 28 bolls of 
meal, or its equivalent. On good land of old cultiva- 
tion, 6 returns and the seed may be considered an 
average crop in England. The grain raised on poor 
unmanured land does not yield meal from the grain, 
equal in quantity to the meal produced from good 
grain. It is, therefore, a fair assumption that 28 
bolls of meal, or food equivalent to that quantity, will 
be the subsistence gained from 7 acres of dug land. 
Now, take the common allowance in Scotland to farm 
servants, of 4 stones of meal per month, where meal 
only is given in lieu of all food, the 3 persons will 
have 18 bolls of meal for their subsistence, or the 
value of that quantity if they can sell it, and 10 
bolls over, for clothing, shoes, and other necessaries 
of the family. It is evident that a family with 2 or 
3 working persons in it could live by spade husbandry, 
and every year, as they improved and reclaimed their 
land, their living would be easier. 

How does spade husbandry stand in comparison 
with horse husbandry ? To plough, harrow, and 
work 50 acres of land is generally reckoned by 
writers on agriculture, to be full work for a pair of 
horses all the year round ; but practically, a farm of 
150 acres under crop must be of very light dry soil 
if 3 pairs of horses do the work. If we take 30 acres 
of such raw damp soil as the emigrant must in 
general begin with, and take into consideration the 
half-starved horses and the stoppage of winter- 
ploughing by snow in Canada, it is probably allowing 
more to a pair of horses than they can really do. 
The keep of a pair of horses and a ploughman, the 



138 spade husbandry; horse husbandry. 

wages, and the tear and wear of implements and horses, 
cannot be reckoned under 65/. a year in any country. 
The ploughing, harrowing, and all horse work on 30 
acres, would thus be 651. Now the digging of 30 
acres, on the above data of l-5th of an acre in 10 days 
per man, and allowing a shilling per day as the value 
of his work, would amount to 75/., making 10/. in 30 
acres in favour of horse -husbandry, as compared to 
spade-husbandry. But, on the other hand, the value 
of the work, the time, and the labour are within the 
spade-cultivator's own family, and would be running 
to waste and lying idle, if not employed in digging. 
One ploughman could work the 30 acres in the same 
time that 6 men would take to dig one-fourth of the 
area ; and, if beneficial employment could be found 
for 5 of the 6 spademen, the saving of labour and 
time by horse-husbandry is unquestionable. But 
where the time and labour saved cannot be employed 
at all, from the want of manufactures, trades, or capi- 
talists, as in great part of France and Germany, and 
in all our new colonies, the superiority of horse-hus- 
bandry over spade-husbandry is not so evident nor 
so real as with us. The time and labour saved are 
saved for idleness, not for work in some other branch 
of industry. 

The culture of the vine is altogether a spade, not a 
horse, husbandry ; and it may rather be called a branch 
of manufacture than of husbandry in France. The 
product of the culture affords neither food nor cloth- 
ing-material directly to the cultivator himself. It 
is only indirectly, by the sale of his product, and 
the purchase of the necessaries of life, that his land 
and labour produce subsistence. The hand labour 
employed in digging, hoeing, and cleaning about the 



VINE CULTURE. 139 

vines, stiking the plants, and binding them as they 
grow to the sticks, and all the other operations of the 
vineyard, is very great ; yet this is but the smallest 
part of the employment given by the vine culture. 
The cooperage in all the wine districts is an immense 
branch of industry. The cartage is immense. Wine 
production is in fact one of the greatest manufactures 
in the world. The diffusion by land and sea, over 
all civilised countries, of wines of French growth, 
exceeds that of any other article of European pro- 
duction. The outlay for labourage, poles, cooper 
work, cartage, makes the vineyard a kind of specu- 
lation for a class of proprietors of higher capital than 
the ordinary peasant-proprietors. They purchase or 
hire extensive tracts under vines ; and labourers who 
have no vineyards of their own, or no land suitable 
for it, undertake the work of the vineyard at so much 
per acre, and hire additional hands when necessary. 
The culture of the vine partakes so much more of 
manufacturing employment than of husbandry, that 
in the wine-growing districts it is not at all uncommon 
on a market-day to see the peasants returning from 
the town with their baskets full of vegetables — not 
going to the market with vegetables to sell. They 
buy their garden stuffs, which enter largely into the 
diet of the people of France, from a class of market 
gardeners within, or close to the town walls, and who 
have a command of manure. The manure, time, and 
labour, where there is a vineyard, cannot be spared for 
garden vegetables. The maize, which is the general 
food in the wine countries, takes the place of grain crops, 
and a small area produces enough for the subsistence 
of the family, leaving the rest of the land for vines. 
The maize, indeed, is sometimes planted in the rows 



140 EFFECTS OF THE VINE CULTURE 

between the vines, but the practice is considered in- 
jurious to the vine plants. The employment of 
labour in the production of wine, and in all the ac- 
cessory trades connected with its transport to the 
consumers, is great, and it is, for the greater part, 
common hand labour, not labour of skill, but like all 
employment not applied direct to the production of 
the labourer's own food, the supply exceeds the de- 
mand. There are seasons also of comparative failure 
in the vintage, and all the trades and branches of 
industry connected with the wine production, and 
which employ many more people than the husbandry 
of the vineyard itself, are thrown into misery. The 
year's work and preparation are lost, and with these 
the means of subsisting until another vintage. This 
is the reason of what travellers so often observe with 
wonder, that the population in the wine countries, 
although the products are the most valuable that land 
can produce, appear much more wretched, ragged, 
and ill off, than the population in the other provinces 
of France. They are, in fact, a manufacturing rather 
than an agricultural population; and are ill-fed, 
ill- clothed, and ill-lodged, because the article they 
manufacture is of uncertain production, the area is 
limited in which it can be produced, while the supply 
of labour in every kind of employment connected 
with it knows no limit but the extreme of wretched- 
ness. It is like the demand and supply of England 
and Scotland for Irish labour at harvest and other 
seasons. The overproduction of labour is encouraged 
by the casual demand. The social condition of the 
Irish people, as well as of the English, is brought to 
the limit of extreme wretchedness by the casual 
employment given at the lowest wages on which the 



ON POPULATION AND EMPLOYMENT. 141 

labourer can subsist. The vine culture has a similar 
effect in the wine growing countries, on population 
and employment. 

To the English traveller, Touraine is a very in- 
teresting country. The changes in the dwellings, 
habits of the people, and face of the land and houses, 
have probably been few since it belonged to England, 
or rather since England belonged to it ; for the conti- 
nental possessions of Henry II. and his successors 
must have been of more value and importance than 
their English. Avignon, Amboise, Blois, Tours, all 
the towns and castles and monasteries belong to, and 
and are important historical points in English story ; 
and they remain — the cottage, the country mansion, 
the roads, woods, gardens, the town dwellings, the 
streets, lanes, market-places — but little altered pro- 
baby in appearance, even where they have been re- 
newed or rebuilt. The castles, the monasteries, the 
baronial chateaux, are dilapidated indeed, and in 
ruins ; but the locality of each, and its features, its 
woods, orchards, vineyards, fish-ponds, avenues, roads 
are still where they were, and probably very much as 
they were, in the twelfth century. It is pleasing at 
any rate, as one travels through this country, to 
imagine so. The salamander, the device of the ducal 
family of Guienne and Poictou, whose heiress Eleanor, 
the divorced Queen of Louis VIL, carried her exten- 
sive domains and mature charms into the arms of our 
young Henry II., is still seen upon the carved key- 
stone of many an arched gateway and porch, in and 
about Tours, Saumur, and other towns on the Loire. 
The England of our days is but the canvas on which 
an old picture has been painted, and a new one 



142 TOURAINE : ENGLAND. 

now covers almost every inch of the old work. But 
this country is an old picture still, notwithstanding 
the cleaning and obliterating by the artists of the 
revolution. Decayed indeed it is, and worm-eaten 
in parts; but original outlines and tints are still to 
be traced in some corners of the canvas, and are even 
lively in the habitations and household ways and 
accommodations of the people. In England, the 
changes in the possession and occupation of landed 
property, the elements of commercial wealth, activity, 
and spirit, and the acquired taste for objects not pro- 
duced by ordinary agricultural industry, have, unless 
in very secluded districts, changed the habits and 
ways of living, obliterated the traces of ancient man- 
ners, and of the dwellings in town and country ac- 
commodated to those ancient modes of life. Here the 
alteration has been less. The original form of the 
dwellings, both in towns and in the country, has been 
continued in every repair, or restoration, custom 
being much more powerful than convenience among 
an agricultural population, and giving way very 
slowly, even to self-interest. The round or square 
tower, with loop-holes and a parapet, although now 
the tower contains only a staircase to the rooms of 
the attached dwelling, is still common in country 
houses. The same form of construction is seen in 
old houses in Scotland. In the towns on the Loire, 
and especially in their deserted streets and unfre- 
quented suburbs, each house of any importance, al- 
though within the ancient town walls, is surrounded 
by its own high dead wall, and the carriage-gate opens 
into a long dead lane, to appearance uninhabited. 
But when the wide oaken coach-door in the wall is 
open, one gets a peep within, at a singular contrast to 



houses: cottages. 143 

the still life without between the high walls of the 
long lane in which the mansion stands. The court- 
yard within is gay with shrubs and flowers in large 
pots and tubs disposed in circles round a fountain 
or a carved stone basin ; and a busy crowd of servants 
are at their household work in rear of the ancient 
mansion, a spacious structure hid behind the high 
walls inclosing it. Defence against sudden tumults 
in the city and concealment have apparently been the 
leading objects in the style of urban and suburban 
buildings, after the fortified tower-houses and castles 
of the earlier part of the middle ages in the country 
were abandoned, and the smaller nobility and landed 
proprietors came to dwell within the walled towns. 
The ancient dwelling of the peasant is constructed on 
different principles. Defence or concealment had not 
been considered where there was little to defend, and 
nothing of value to be destroyed, or taken away, but 
the standing crops and cattle. The old-fashioned cot- 
tage of a date prior to the revolution in France, is a 
spacious dwelling of low side-walls buried under a 
mountain of thatch, a huge roof, and very massive 
beams of oak or walnut-tree support an upper floor, 
of which the windows peep through the thick bed of 
straw or reed thatch in which they are sunk, and 
which appears to have been accumulating, layer above 
layer, for many generations. The ground-floor is 
divided into a large kitchen, which is the sitting-room 
of the family, and an inner apartment — the but and 
ben of the Scotch cottage dwellings of the same class 
of peasantry in the Lowlands in former times. In this 
richer country, the lodging of the people has been 
better than it ever was in Scotland, and better perhaps 



144 FURNITURE OF THE PEASANTRY. 

than it ever was in England, for the labouring agri- 
cultural population, because the material for building 
— the rye-straw or reeds for roofing, the timber, the 
bricks or stone — had little commercial value in a 
country of bad or no roads for transport, and could 
only be applied to buildings on the spot. The re- 
semblance, real or imaginary, which the traveller finds 
in the style of building, of husbandry, of domestic life 
and arrangements, between this part of France and 
England, and especially Scotland, as these things were 
in England and Scotland of old, is very interesting ; 
but, perhaps, is more in fancy than reality, and arising 
from his previous knowledge that all this country was 
once part of the dominions of the English Crown, and 
was, for many generations, the resort of the nobles 
and gentry of Scotland, who took service in the body 
guards of the kings of France. A favourite article of 
furniture in these ancient dwellings of the French 
peasantry, equivalent to the eight-day clock as a 
general piece of household goods among our labouring 
country people, is a large shining walnut-tree press 
or wardrobe, reaching from the floor to the ceiling, 
with carved folding-doors hung upon long bright 
swivel-hinges of polished steel. In the best apartment 
of substantial peasants four of these wardrobes op- 
posite to each other, so well polished by rubbing that 
they are quite ornamental, contain the stock of house- 
hold linen and all such valuables. The ordinary 
sitting-room or hall in those old cottages, with its 
huge beams of oak or walnut-tree across the ceiling, 
its great fire of logs on the wide hearth, around which 
the females are busy with their household work ; the 
distaff and spindle in the hands of the housemother, 



VALLEY OF THE LOIRE. 145 

and, if it be the village inn, the nice little table with 
the cleanest of table-linen, the lively buxom girl cook- 
ing, talking, and waiting on the guests, and the 
plenty to eat and drink, give the traveller who walks 
through the valley of the Loire, the impression that, 
in Chaucer's days, such may have been the hostelries 
in the pleasant- land of Kent, at which the pilgrims to 
the shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury put up. Our 
writers of historical romance might dig with advan- 
tage in the mines of picturesque mediaeval lore of 
which these provinces of our Norman kings were the 
field, and of which traces are still visible in the 
manners, houses, and household ways of the people. 
Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott have not exhausted 
this field of ancient romantic action, on which Scotch, 
as well as English, nobles have played their parts. The 
successors of Louis XL, Charles VII., and Louis XII. 
employed the Scotch ofiicers of their body-guard in 
high commands, in their eventful campaigns in Lom- 
bardy and Calabria. The chronicle of Jean d'Auton, 
a contemporary of Louis XII., is full of picturesque 
characters, romantic incident, and deeds of chival- 
rous daring. The Duke of Albany, Berault Stewart 
seigneur of Aubigne, Robert Stewart, George Cock- 
burn, and other familiar names of Scotch nobles and 
gentry, appear prominently in his account of those 
Italian campaigns. It may be regretted that Sir 
Walter Scott bestowed so much of the witchery of 
his genius upon border forays, and cattle-lifting lairds 
who, even in their own days, were scarcely to be 
reckoned among the chivalry of Scotland ; and has 
neglected the exploits recorded in the French chroni- 
cles of those times, of the Douglases, Hamiltons, 



146 VALLEY OP THE LOIRE. 

Stewarts, Gordons, St. Clairs, who were dukes and 
princes in foreign lands (the Douglases were dukes 
of Touraine for several generations) before the border 
lairds he celebrates, or even those of his own clan, the 
Scotts, had, in the Scottish phrase, " a midden o' their 
ain for their cocks to craw on," 






LAND AND POPULATION, 147 



CHAP. VIII. 

NOTES ON LAND AND POPULATION ON THE CONTINENT AND IN 
ENGLAND. — A RESERVE OF LAND IN ENGLAND TO MEET AN 
INCREASE OF POPULATION — NONE ON THE CONTINENT — PRO- 
BABLE CONSEQUENCES. — ON THE ABOLITION OF THE CORN- 
LAWS AS A CONSERVATIVE MEASURE FOR THE ENGLISH LANDED 

INTEREST. RENTS IN KIND. HIGH FARMING NOT JUDICIOUS 

WITH LOW PRICES AND MONEY RENTS. ON ^MEASURES RESORTED 

TO IN FORMER TIMES FOR LIMITING THE INCREASE OF POPULA- 
TION TO THE AMOUNT OF EMPLOYMENT. — EVERY COUNTRY HAS 
ITS OWN POLITICAL ECONOMY SUITED TO ITS PHYSICAL CIRCUM- 
STANCES. — GUILDS OR INCORPORATIONS OF TRADES IS LABOUR 

A PROPERTY? SOCIALISM IS A REVIVAL OF THE PRINCIPLE OF 

THE GUILDS OF THE MIDDLE AGES — THE PRINCIPLE AND RE- 
SULTS THE SAME. 

The traveller who has an eye to the agricultural state 
of other countries compared to that of his own, cannot 
fail to observe that the land of the Continent is cul- 
tivated up to its capability of cultivation and of em- 
ploying its inhabitants, much more closely than the 
land of England or Scotland. Whatever admits of 
being ploughed or dug is cultivated. The land may 
not be so productively and profitably cultivated as in 
England or Scotland, although this assumption of 
superior productiveness, on equal quality of soils, 
may be reasonably questioned, but it is more gene- 
rally cultivated. All land that is at all capable of 
yielding a crop, should it only be a return of the seed 
and of the labourer's subsistence, is under culture. 
Woods and groves planted and preserved for orna- 
ment, parks, pleasure-grounds, lawns, shrubberies, old 

L 2 



148 LAND IN RESERVE TN ENGLAND, 

grass fields of excellent soil producing only crops for 
luxury, such as pasture and hay for the finer breeds 
of horses, village greens, commons, lanes between 
fields, waste corners and patches outside of the fences 
or along the roads, hedges, ditches, banks, walls, all 
which together occupy perhaps as much land in 
England as the land under crops of grain, are very 
rare on the Continent. The plough and the spade 
work up to the door-steps of the most respectable 
country mansion, and to the gates of the most con- 
siderable cities. There are, no doubt, vast tracts of 
land on the Continent too sterile and thin of soil to 
admit of culture at all, even with the spade of a pea- 
sant-proprietor working on it for his own subsistence 
only ; but whatever land affords a reasonable hope of 
reproducing the seed and food that must be expended 
on its culture, should it only be in a crop of rye (a 
grain that puts up with the poorest quality of soil), 
seems to be occupied and cultivated. The land of a 
quality that never could produce rent to a landlord 
and profit and a return of his capital to the tenant, is 
not, as in England and Scotland, lying waste and un- 
used ; but is cultivated for the mere return of the seed 
and subsistence of the labouring cultivator. This is 
the natural consequence of the small estate occupancy 
of the land, and of equal inheritance. The want of 
manufacturing employment has thrown all labour upon 
the land, and the land is consequently cultivated closely 
up to its capability of culture. The land with us is 
cultivated only up to its capability of profitable pro- 
duction to the landlord and tenant. Rent and profits 
set limits to cultivation in Britain ; but positive ste- 
rility, the utter incapability of the soil to reproduce 
the seed and the subsistence of the labourer working 



BUT FULLY OCCUPIED ON THE CONTINENT. 149 

on it as proprietor for his own living, seem the only 
limit to cultivation abroad. 

The forests and woods are extensive in many parts 
of the Continent ; but these cannot be diminished or 
cleared away, and the land they occupy taken into 
cultivation. They are not, as with us, preserved for 
ornament or pleasure, but are as necessary as the 
corn-land. They produce the fuel for the population, 
both for domestic use and for metallic processes and 
manufacturing purposes. They produce the building 
timber, the materials of the vine-culture, the poles, 
staves, hoops, the materials of the tanner, and also 
the tar, potash, charcoal, and other products as 
necessary almost as grain crops to a civilised subsist- 
ence. We obtain these products in Britain from 
other sources than the surface of our own land — the 
fuel from below ground, the other products of the 
forest from over-sea countries. On the Continent the 
land has to produce every necessary of life — food, 
fuel, building timber, clothing materials, viz. flax, 
hemp, wool, hides, and other articles too bulky for 
land carriage to considerable distances. In England 
and Scotland the land has to produce food only. On 
the Continent, all the land that can be spared for 
cultivation, and is capable of producing the smallest 
returns of food, is fully occupied. There is no land 
in reserve to fall back upon. Much of the land of 
Great Britain that is capable of cultivation and of 
subsisting the labourer, although not of yielding rent 
and profit besides, is not cultivated, and is still in 
reserve for a future population. If these observa- 
tions be correct — and every traveller can verify them 
from his own observation — they lead to curious and 
important conclusions. 

L 3 



150 PROBABLE CONSEQUENCES OE THE FULL 

1st. Any considerable increase of population on 
the Continent, or a succession of years of bad crops 
such as we read of in the chronicles of the middle 
ages — and the potato blight in 1 846 and the following 
years reminds us that agricultural skill and improve- 
ment supposed to be very superior to the husbandry 
of the Continent, cannot avert such physical calami- 
ties — would plunge Germany and France into the 
deepest miseries of famine that history ever told of. 
The land in those countries is cultivated up to its 
capability of culture with its present agricultural 
means and social arrangements, and peopled up to all 
the employment that land can give which is cultivated 
to feed the labourers upon it. The land and the em- 
ployment are fully occupied and filled up. Any in- 
crease of the population on the Continent can only 
subsist by the deterioration of the condition of the 
previously existing population, in proportion to that 
increase. Additional numbers can only exist by abs- 
tracting the means of subsistence from the present 
numbers. Home-trade and manufacturing for the 
home consumption must be diminished with the di- 
minished means to buy and consume, in consequence 
of an additional number of population being thrown 
upon the same fund of employment and subsistence 
— that of labour on the land. The manufacturing 
for foreign markets can scarcely be talked of as a 
means of subsisting any important proportion of the 
population of Germany or France. The sea, or em- 
ployment connected with shipping and sea-affairs, 
cannot be reckoned as a means of absorbing a surplus 
population in those countries. The sea is not an 
element in their existence, and never can be of im- 
portance as a means of employment and subsistence. 



OCCUPATION OF LAND AND EMPLOYMENT. 151 

The land, and nothing but the land, can give support 
and employment to the great mass of the Continental 
population ; and the land with its employment is 
already filled up. The commotions on the Continent 
in 1848 — 1849 may, I conceive, b$ mainly ascribed to 
the want of beneficial employment, in the new social 
state, for the mass of the population. The great 
majority of the inhabitants of France and Germany, 
raising their own food by their own labour, from 
their own land, and with each succeeding generation 
having more co-heirs to support from the produce of 
the same piece of land, must reduce their enjoyment 
of, and expenditure on, the most needful articles of 
a civilised life to the smallest scale. This is a retro- 
grade, not an advancing, state of society. With our 
reserve of land for our agricultural population, and 
our great variety of employment for the population 
not engaged in agriculture, by our commercial and 
manufacturing capital and facilities, we are not so 
near, by many degrees, to a great social crisis as the 
Continental people. They are on the very verge of 
such a crisis. The land is filled up with inhabitants 
to its utmost capability of employing and supporting 
them. Improved husbandry might add to the quan- 
tity of food, but not to the quantity of employment 
from the land. Any other employment in manu- 
facturing for the foreign market or for the yearly 
diminishing consumption of the home-market, is too 
insignificant to absorb any considerable proportion 
of the excess of population, however slowly that may 
be increasing. Famine, pestilence, Avars abroad and 
tumults at home, are the only visible and natural 
means of sweeping away the surplus population run- 

L 4 



152 ABOLITION OF THE COKN-LAWS 

ning over the margin of any reproductive employment 
the Continent affords. 

2nd. If these observations be correct, the abolition 
of the import duties on corn will prove to have been 
the most truly conservative measure which the legis- 
lature could have devised — one which will preserve, 
for some generations, at least, to our nobility, gentry, 
and landed interests, their domains, their estates, and 
their proper social influence. Their rents may be 
diminished ; but their land will remain in its old 
shape and value, as it was enjoyed by their grand- 
fathers before the last war. If there be truth in 
statistical reports and speculations, our population is 
increasing at the rate of about 1-J- per cent, yearly. 
We 'are adding about half a million, or, at the least, 
420,000 people every year to our numbers. Allow 
that emigration could effectually take off 250,000 
yearly — and it is at least doubtful if any emigration 
scheme, with the utmost aid government could justly 
give, and on the largest scale, could effect so much — 
still our population is augmenting at such a rate 
that, before the end of the present century, we shall 
have 8^- millions of people to subsist more than we 
have now ; that is, we shall have a population equal 
to that of all Ireland at present, in addition to our 
present numbers. We can subsist them, having al- 
most all the employment of the world for our manu- 
facturing industry, and all the corn of the world at 
command by our duty-free import of grain. But 
we could not subsist them in peace, and in acqui- 
escence in the existing arrangement of the social 
body in Great Britain, if there was a tax on corn or 
other food. Would a nation sit still and starve while 
there was land around them capable of subsisting 



A CONSERVATIVE MEASURE. 153 

them, and requiring only tillage, seed, and their own 
labour ? It would not be the abolition of the corn- 
laws only that would then be demanded, but the 
division of the land of the country among the natives 
of the country. Communism, socialism, every wild 
theory of the agrarian rights of a people to a share 
in, and a subsistence from, their native soil would 
find partisans, arguments, and physical support from 
starving millions. The rights of hunger would super- 
sede the rights of property. A frightful anarchy, a 
forcible occupation of the land, an agrarian war of 
millions against the small body of English landholders, 
would as certainly ensue as it did in France at the 
beginning of the revolution, when the people rose in 
their might and fury, drove the class of landed pro- 
prietors from their estates, and kept the land. The 
free importation of food has averted a similar social 
convulsion, and has deprived the agitator and hireling 
speech-maker of his plea of oppression from class in- 
terests and conventional laws in favour of the land- 
owners. Six months later the same concession — the 
abolition of the corn -laws — would not have satisfied 
the million, and have carried the present social state 
of Great Britain, and the sacred security of property, 
through the storm which is now raging on the Con- 
tinent, and rending every social institution to its 
roots. The landed interest of Great Britain made a 
narrow escape. 

3rd. The land will be preserved to its rightful 
owners with us, but not the present rent of land. 
Kent is but a casualty, not a right, attached to land. 
Tt has no such sacred character as property. To sup- 
port high rents by laws prohibiting the free importa- 
tion of articles of prime necessity, is not a legislation 



154 HIGH FAKMING A DELUSION. 

which would be submitted to in the present grow- 
ing state of population and intelligence. Kents must 
clearly fall along with the price of the articles from 
which rent is produced. High farming, as it is called, 
that is, the attempt, by outlay of capital in expensive 
manures, draining, and other costly operations, to 
increase the quantity of produce from the land — to 
make up for the diminished value of that produce, 
seems a great delusion not founded on the natural 
principle which guides other branches of productive 
industry. When the markets for cotton, silk, woollen, 
or iron products are glutted, no remunerating prices 
to be got, and no reasonable prospect to be seen of 
any improvement in the value of these products at 
any future period, is that the time when manufac- 
turers erect new and expensive machinery, and lay 
ont more and more capital for producing more and 
more of these articles for an already over-stocked 
market ? High manufacturing requires high prices 
in proportion to the cost of production, either in 
reality, or in a near and reasonable prospect. High 
farming must have the same basis of high prices for 
its products, or it will prove a ruinous speculation to 
the tenant who engages in it with his own capital. 
But why cannot the British farmer, with his greater 
skill, capital, and economy of production, raise vastly 
greater crops, and undersell with advantage, at least 
in the British market, the foreign grain which has 
heavy charges of freight, warehouse rent, and labour- 
age against it ? The reason is this. The foreign grain 
brought to England from the continent of Europe, 
consists either of rents, quit-rents, or feu-duties, paid 
in kind by the actual farmer ; or it is the surplus 
produce of the small estate of the peasant-proprietor. 



NO MINIMUM PKICE IN FOREIGN GRAIN. 155 

In either case the subsistence of the family producing 
it is taken off, and also whatever is required to pay 
tithe, rates, and even taxes, which, as well as rent, 
are not paid in money, but in naturalia, in grain, 
and generally in certain proportions of the crops 
raised. The free surplus for exportation may be sold 
at any price in the English market, however low; be- 
cause if it bring in nothing at all, the loss neither 
deranges the circumstances nor the ordinary subsist- 
ence and way of living of the farmers producing it. 
All their rents or payments are settled in grain, all 
their subsistence, clothing, and necessary expenditure 
are provided for, and the surplus is merely a quan- 
tity which must be sold because it is perishable, and 
which, if it sells well, may enable them to lay out a 
little more on the gratifications and tastes of a higher 
state of civilisation ; but, if it sells badly, or for no- 
thing at all, does not affect their means of reproduc- 
tion, nor even their ordinary habits, enjoyments, way 
of living, or stock. They have not paid a price for 
their corn in rent, wages, manures, and other outlay 
of money, as the British farmer does before he brings 
his corn to market ; and have therefore no minimum 
below which they cannot afford to sell it without ruin. 
The great landowner in Russia, Poland, or the north- 
east of Germany, is no doubt much better off, if he 
can sell his four or rive thousand quarters of grain 
paid him as rents, quit-rents, or feu -duties, at a high 
price ; but it has no cost-price to him ; and to him, as 
well as to the small peasant-proprietor, the very low- 
est price the export merchant will give him for it is 
still a gain, and to earn a freight and a trifle more 
is still a gain to the export merchant. The British 
farmers can only put themselves on a footing with 



156 LIMITATIONS ON THE CONTINENT 

the Continental farmers by recurring to payments of 
rent in kind -J so many bushels of wheat, oats, barley, 
per acre, or a proportion, one-fifth, one-fourth, one- 
third, of the actual crops produced each year, and of 
the estimated value of the pasture land under live 
stock. Without some arrangement of this kind, high 
farming to undersell farmers who can afford to sell 
all they individually produce for market at any 
price, and who, with but a trifling surplus at stake 
individually, produce a mass, when joined together, 
overwhelming in our markets all competition, seems 
a very unsound speculation for our British farmers to 
engage in. 

Emigration to our colonies is the great means 
proposed by the political economists of our day 
for draining off the superabundant population of 
the country. Nature seems working for the same 
end by cholera, famine, and its diseases. The tra- 
veller who observes these efforts of the social bodv at 
home to throw off, like a patient under a disease, by 
natural and artificial means, this repletion of num- 
bers will make it the first subject of his inquiries 
abroad, What have been the peculiar measures resorted 
to, in different countries and ages, for limiting the 
increase of population to the amount of employment 
and subsistence ? Husbandry, which is the main 
employment of the people in all countries of the 
Continent, carries within itself a kind of check upon 
over-population ; especially where husbandry is car- 
ried on, as it is on the greater part of the Continent, 
by the owners of the land for their own subsistence, 
by their own labour on their own small estates. The 
employment and subsistence that the land can give 
are visible and confined mostly within the family. 



UPON EXCESS OF POPULATION. 157 

There is no fluctuating demand for labour. The 
most imprudent and thoughtless in this social state 
can see exactly what they have to depend upon, and 
are obliged to pause before they enter improvidently 
into marriage. But there is necessarily in every 
country a great part of the population not possessed 
of land, and who live by supplying others with the 
various articles of their trades and handicrafts. How 
was this portion of the population prevented, under 
the old economy of the Continent, from overflowing ? 
Why were not they in the same state of redundancy 
in proportion to subsistence as our own operatives in 
the same trades and handicrafts ? This inquiry leads 
the traveller to the ultimate conclusion, that different 
principles of political economy are imposed upon 
different countries by the natural differences of their 
climate, geographical position, products, and other 
physical circumstances ; and that every country has 
in reality a political economy of its own, suitable to 
those different physical circumstances, and to the 
interests, employments, character, spirit, wants, and 
habits of the inhabitants as formed by those circum- 
stances. 

It is evident that in countries in which, for half the 
year, out-door work is impeded and precarious from 
the weather, the moving power of water for driving 
machinery, and the supply of fuel for steam power 
cannot be depended upon, and even the transport of 
goods in canals, rivers, sea-harbours, and by land 
roads, is prevented for weeks or months in winter, 
by frost and snow, the same principles of political 
economy cannot be suitable and applicable to their 
social arrangements, as in countries in which, like 
Britain, rivers and roads, sea and land, are always 



158 LIMITATIONS ON THE CONTINENT 

open and available for the transport of raw materials, 
provisions, goods, and labour, to any point where they 
are in demand, at any season, and where out-door 
work may be carried on almost every day in the 
year. Take the most simple case of two countries 
of about equal population, but of different climates, 
Scotland and Sweden or Denmark, and consider 
whether, owing to difference of climate alone, the 
same principles of social and political economy which 
work beneficially in the one country, could be applied 
to the other. In Scotland, the fruitful mother of 
speculations in political economy, and always eager 
to impose her bantlings on her neighbours, no evil 
arises in society from the most perfect freedom of 
trade and industrial action. Every man may apply 
his capital, industry, skill, time, and labour of hand 
or head, where and how he pleases, without restric- 
tion, without interference, or any right on the part 
of government to interfere ; and the common man in 
England is scarcely so free as in Scotland, because he 
is there under some restriction in his removal to any 
new domicile, by the effect of poor rate and the law 
of settlement. Hence, it is concluded by our Scotch 
political economists, that capital and industry should 
in no case be interfered with in their free action by 
an enlightened government ; that the most perfect 
freedom of trade, capital, labour, and industrial 
action should be the principle of all social arrange- 
ments in all countries. But, suppose Scotland were 
to change climates with Sweden, Denmark, Hanover, 
or any country in the north of Europe ; suppose the 
Clyde, the Forth, the Tay, and all harbours on the 
coast inaccessible, or of very uncertain access, from 
ice daring the winter months ; all transport by land 



UPON EXCESS OF POPULATION. 159 

of food, fuel, goods, and of raw materials for manu- 
facturing industry, impeded every winter by snow, 
for several weeks or even months, would it then be a 
safe practical economy of the state, and one adapted 
to the well-being of the whole community, to allow 
such masses of population as those of Glasgow, Paisley, 
Dundee, and many other places, to be engendered 
and accumulated, without any interference of the 
state for their subsistence, employment, or dispersion ? 
Would non-interference then be a sound and suitable 
principle in the political economy of the country ? 
Would it be a wise social arrangement then, as it 
unquestionably is now, to allow every man, without 
inquiry, interference, or restriction on the part of 
government, to establish with his capital or credit 
any manufactory he pleased in any locality and on 
any scale, and to gather to one spot as many labour- 
ers or operatives as he pleased and thought fit to 
employ, during the six months in which he must work 
with double numbers if possible, in order to overtake 
the markets and throw stocks into them for the win- 
ter demand ; and when the season arrives in which 
neither food, fuel, raw materials, nor goods can be 
transported by land or sea, and machinery must stop 
from want of water power, to shut up his factory 
and leave his operatives and labourers to starve, or 
to be subsisted by a poor-rate levied from his neigh- 
bours ? In our climate the redundant population in 
one locality can, at any season, remove to another in 
which their labour may be in demand ; and neither 
natural nor artificial impediments prevent them from 
moving, at any season, in search of employment. 
And, in our climate, labour in our principal branches 
of industry is in demand, and may be employed all 



160 THE PRINCIPLE OF GUILDS. 

the year round, according to the state of markets 
and stocks. The living stream of labour is unim- 
peded by physical hinderances of frost and snow, and 
finds its level at all seasons in our climate. In coun- 
tries to which nature has denied this advantage, and 
this is the case, more or less, in all the north and 
west of Europe, can the unrestrained freedom of 
trade and industry, and the non-interference of go- 
vernment with the application and use of capital in 
manufactures be as safely adopted ? Is not climate 
an element in their social and political economy, which 
cannot be disregarded with safety to the general well- 
being, while, with us, it is one of no importance ? 
It is probably this and other physical elements, un- 
felt in our social state and insular position, which 
force themselves into the social arrangements of the 
Continent, and have given rise to, and perhaps justi- 
fy, the principle of the superintendence, intervention, 
and restrictions of the Continental governments on 
the free action of trade and capital. Their system of 
political economy, their intervention between capital 
and labour, is not consistent with our political econo- 
my and our great principle of the most perfect free- 
dom in the employment of capital and ]abour ; but, 
with them, and in the physical circumstances under 
which they live, it may be the best for the well-being 
of the great majority of the population. 

The guilds, or incorporations of trades and of all 
labour of skill, and all capital employed in those in- 
corporated branches of industry, prevail still on the 
Continent, and may possibly be maintained by a spirit 
of monopoly, and by a narrow-minded selfishness of 
the masters of the crafts and of the governments that 
support them in their privileges in opposition to all 



PRINCIPLE OF GUILDS. 161 

sound principle ; but it is also possible that they have 
had their origin in some real necessity of preventing 
the accumulation of a greater population in any one 
branch of industry than could be supported by it in 
the locality. The principle may have been sound 
and suitable in the ages and under the circumstances 
in which they arose. When the branches of industry 
were comparatively few, and the natural and conven- 
tional difficulties of transporting the products of in- 
dustry from place to place were great, and no outlet 
existed for the surplus labour of one city or locality 
to any other, but all men were confined by natural, 
legal, or social hinderances to removal, within the 
walls, it may be said, of their native place, the restric- 
tions on the numbers who could apply to, and exercise 
any trade or handicraft in the locality, the postpone- 
ment, by long apprenticeships, journeymanships, and 
other regulations, of the period when they could take 
up the " freedom of their trade," as it was called, and 
settle as masters, and marry, and bring up families, 
may not have been so very reprehensible and contrary 
to sound principle. The restrictive system may have 
been most suitable to the social and economical cir- 
cumstances of Europe, in the early ages ; and may 
be so at this day in many countries. It seems to be 
a great and common mistake of political economists 
to consider the principles of their science applicable, 
like those of morality or equity, to all nations in all 
stages of civilisation, under all social circumstances, 
and all varieties of situation, climate, and products. 
Political economy wants that characteristic and test 
of true science — the universal applicability of its 
principles. Every country apparently has its own 
political and social economy, its own social arrange* 

M 



162 PEINCIPLE OF GUILDS. 

ments suited to its own idiosyncrasy, its own pecu- 
liar circumstances of soil, climate, products, geogra- 
phical position, character, and spirit. Nations seem 
to be guided in their social arrangements, not by 
reasoning and formal doctrines of philosophy, but by 
a kind of instinct for the suitable, like that of bees, 
ants, and other animals living in communities, and 
form laws, habits, and institutions adapted to the 
physical circumstances in which they are placed. 
They first make what the philosopher, ages after, 
reasons upon, blames, or admires, and rarely perhaps 
improves. Before the political economist condemns, 
ore rotundo, the whole restrictive system of the Con- 
tinent, with all its guilds, incorporations, privileges, 
licences, superintendence, and interference, he should 
consider that these social arrangements have existed 
on the continent of Europe, from the decline of the 
Koman empire in the fourth century until the pre- 
sent times, and have existed in Asia, in the castes and 
classification of employments belonging to each caste, 
more extensively and in more ancient stages of civi- 
lisation than in Europe. They have survived all 
revolutions, invasions, conquests, and changes of go- 
vernments or dynasties, The machinery may have 
been altered in some countries of Europe, the power 
centralised and managed in the bureaux of public 
functionaries and departments of government, in- 
stead of being left in the hands of the incorporation 
council or masters of the crafts in each municipality; 
but still the principle and the power of restriction on 
the employment of industry and capital, in almost 
every branch of labour but husbandry, have remained. 
In constitutional Belgium, in republican Erance, leave 
and licence to exercise any handicraft, or any branch 






IS LABOUR A PROPERTY? 163 

of industry, must be applied for, and obtained, and 
the establishment or workshop, be it great or small, 
must be licensed, inspected, controlled, permitted, 
as well as in autocratic Austria or Denmark. This 
vitality of the principle, for fourteen centuries, in 
western Europe — its revival, after the fall of the 
Eoman empire, in the ashes of the cities laid waste 
by the Gothic invaders — its diffusion, from time im- 
memorial, over India — its full vigour, although in 
different hands, in the hands of government func- 
tionaries instead of local incorporations — over the 
whole continent of Europe, at the present day, when 
the demand for civil freedom, with which it is alto- 
gether incompatible, has risen to a temporary frenzy 
of the public mind, show that the principle is deeply 
rooted in some generally felt, but not generally 
understood, necessity or expediency, and in very 
powerful social and physical circumstances. — What is 
this necessity or expediency, or these social and phy- 
sical circumstances, to which, in all ages and coun- 
tries, civil liberty in the exercise of industry has been 
sacrificed? 

This question involves one which has become all 
important in the present social state of Europe — one 
which is at the bottom of socialism, communism, and 
all the theories of social equality and agrarian rights, 
which are now beginning to convulse civilised society 
— Is labour property ? 

Labour is the mother of property. If any thing 
can be called a man's own, it is what the labour of his 
hands has produced out of the natural materials com- 
mon to all human beings. The fish from the river, 
the deer from the forest, the fruit from the tree, be- 
come the property of the fisherman, the hunter, or 

M 2 



164 EIGHT OF PROPERTY IN LABOUR 

the man in a state of nature, only in virtue of his 
labour bestowed in acquiring it. The proprietory 
right is derived from labour. Law is instituted to 
protect the proprietory right; but it is labour, not 
law, that gives the right. But is labour itself a pro- 
perty entitled to legal protection as much as land, or 
goods, or any kind of property that labour produces ? 
How has this question been dealt with in different 
ages, and in different stages of civilisation ? The 
common accord of mankind, in admitting or refusing 
a property in labour, must go far in settling the 
question. 

In the earliest civilised countries, India and China, 
labour appears to have been always a property vested 
in certain castes, or classes, alone entitled to exercise 
certain handicrafts ; and, from the most remote times, 
the exclusive privilege of each caste or class appears 
to have been fenced in by religious observances and 
protection. In ancient Home, incorporations of trades- 
men living in distinct streets are mentioned ; and in 
the European cities which grew up under the Roman 
empire, the rights of incorporations to their respective 
branches of industry were universally acknowledged. 
When manufactures were few and simple — and that 
is not many generations ago, even in England — and 
the clothing material of the people of Europe was 
almost entirely confined to the woollen and linen 
stuffs manufactured in every household, from the raw 
materials raised on every farm, and cotton or silk 
fabrics were scarcely used or known but by the 
highest class, the skilled labour of the few tradesmen 
required in that social state — the labour of the black- 
smiths, joiners, weavers, tailors, tanners, shoemakers, 
and other such operatives in the useful arts — was 



PROTECTED BY THE ANCIENT GUILDS. 165 

universally admitted to be a property. It was vested 
in trustees for the benefit of the individuals who had 
acquired a share in the property of each craft — that 
is, a right to exercise it. These trustees were the 
master-tradesmen, constituting the guild or incorpo- 
ration for the protection of the property of the mem- 
bers in their own branch of industry. They could 
prevent all other workmen from producing or selling 
their kind of goods, publicly or privately, in their 
localities. The avowed social object of these privi- 
leged bodies, and of their restrictions on the free 
exercise of trades and handicrafts, was to prevent 
the over-multiplication of operatives in their several 
crafts, and the injury which would thereby accrue to 
the property of the already existing operatives in their 
own labour. In order to restrain the increase of 
numbers within the limits of the employment which 
would afford a fair subsistence to the workman, none 
were allowed to exercise any handicraft who had not 
served a long apprenticeship — unnecessarily long for 
merely learning the trade, then a long journeyman- 
ship, and even then waiting for a vacancy among the 
master-tradesmen of the craft. This system attempted, 
and not without effect, to keep down over-population, 
to establish a right of property in labour, and to se- 
cure a fair subsistence from labour to the operative 
class. The towns and cities being generally walled 
round, and the village and country populations being 
generally bound to the baronial proprietors in serf- 
age, no manufacturing or smuggling by unfree unli- 
censed workmen could take place to any considerable 
extent ; and the supply of the public with all the 
articles of handicrafts, or labour of skill, was confined 
to those who had acquired a property in that labour. 



166 EIGHT OF PKOPERTY IN LABOUR 

In the north of Europe this restrictive system remains, 
and gives a property in labour, to the present clay. In 
England, owing to our open un walled towns, our per- 
sonal freedom of action and movement, and our water- 
communications along the coasts and on our rivers, 
no such restrictions in favour of proprietors of labour 
could at any period have been effective. We acknow- 
ledge the principle, however, that labour is property, 
in all cases in which it is possible to protect it by law. 
The astriction to mills, the rights of ferries, the rights 
of watermen, pilots, and of the medical, legal, and 
clerical professions to exclude from their branches of 
labour all, however well qualified, who have not ac- 
quired the privilege to exercise them, the right of the 
author to his book, of the musical composer to his 
tune, are acknowledgments that labour is a property 
which law will protect wherever it is possible to 
apply law to its protection ; and that the fault is not 
in the right, but in the social arrangement which 
renders the law ineffective, if protection cannot be 
given in England to property in labour as fully as 
to property in land or goods. There is a power in 
society to which even law must give way — the power 
of public opinion of what is useful and expedient for 
the public interests. This opinion in Britain is op- 
posed to the restrictive system of the Continent, and 
holds it to be inexpedient and unjust to the rest of 
the community that corporations should enjoy a mo- 
nopoly of the supply of the most necessary products 
of industry, while the operative members of these 
corporate bodies are subject to no competition oblig- 
ing them to work cheaply, expeditiously, and well. 
The perfect freedom of trade, industry, and labour, is 
he principle of all our political economy and social 



PROTECTED BY THE ANCIENT GUILDS. 167 

arrangements. Kestriction is but the exception with 
us, and freedom is but the exception on the Continent. 
This difference of principle in the social arrangement 
and political economy of the English and the Conti- 
nental people has arisen from the different circum- 
stances, physical and political, in which they live. 
It is little more than a century and a half since 
England cast herself loose from the same restrictive 
system as that of the Continent, and set out on a 
cruise of manufacturing and commercial enterprise, 
under a flag of free trade in all internal handicrafts 
and productive industry. This has succeeded well 
with England. Her geographical position on the 
globe, her climate, her minerals, her facilities of 
transport, her colonies, made that restrictive system 
unsuitable and inexpedient for her, which may be the 
best adapted for countries under circumstances natu- 
rally altogether different, and which cannot enter on 
the same career. There is not room in the world for 
two Great Britains. There is scarcely consumption 
enough for what the one is producing in every branch 
of manufacturing industry. It might not be a wise 
political economy for any Continental country to 
abandon the principle of the ancient restrictive sys- 
tem, that labour is property to be protected by law, 
and to break up entirely the guilds or incorporations 
of trades and handicrafts by which labour is protected 
from the influx of more workmen into any one locality 
or trade than can earn a subsistence in it, and by 
which the increase of population in general beyond 
the means of a civilised subsistence is, in some degree, 
checked. The old restrictive system, founded on the 
principle that labour is property, is entitled to the 
consideration of legislators and political economists, 

M 4 



168 THE PKINCIPLE OF GUILDS THE SAME 

not only as the most ancient and universal of all 
social arrangements, and common to Asia and Europe, 
but because it is identical in principle with the newest 
theories and speculations of the Faubourg St. Antoine, 
which in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, have raised a 
storm that shakes the world. The common principle, 
common to the old restrictive system of incorpora- 
tions and to the new communist or socialist theories 
of 1848, is that labour is property entitled to such 
protection from law, that the operative labourer is 
secured in a subsistence from his property in his 
craft or trade, in sickness, or when out of work, as 
well as in health and in full employment. This was 
the end and object of the incorporations of trades, 
and the restrictions on the free exercise of industry 
in the middle ages ; and it is the end and object of 
all the modern schemes of communism, socialism, co- 
operative labour for a common subsistence, and all 
the other visions of the working-classes on the Conti- 
nent in 1848. The public mind has been going round 
like a blind horse in a mill, fancying that it has been 
advancing, while it has only been returning to the 
point in the circle from which it set out. It would 
be rash to conclude that the principle, and the insti- 
tutions derived from it in the middle ages, and pro- 
jected under other forms and names now, are unsound 
and unsuitable to the social state of the Continental 
people at the present day. We see them reclaimed 
with equal vehemence by parties at the opposite poles 
of political opinion, and on the same grounds, viz. that 
labour is property — reclaimed by the ultra- conserva- 
tive party, which would adhere to the old restrictive 
policy and establishments derived from the feudal 
ages — and by that which adopts the wildest theories 



AS THE PRINCIPLE OF SOCIALISM. 169 

of community of labour and rights to subsistence, 
without being aware apparently that, carried into 
effect, their theories would lead to the very institu- 
tions and spirit of the times, and to the very restric- 
tions of those times on freedom, which they repudiate 
and denounce. The view of the identity of the prin- 
ciple and of the practical results ensuing from it, in 
the old incorporation-system of all branches of labour 
and the new schemes of co-operative labour for a 
common subsistence, and all other modifications of 
the idea that labour is a property, is confirmed by 
two remarkable facts. The one is, that the table of 
the German parliament at Frankfort, in the spring of 
1849, was covered every day with petitions from 
Baden, Hesse, YTiirtemberg, Bavaria, the very seats of 
the great agitation for freedom and constitutional 
government and equal laws — and not for freedom of 
trade and the abolition of the remaining restrictions 
of the old corporation system, but for new restrictions 
on the freedom of trade, more stringent than the old ; 
for taxes on all machinery that deprived the manual 
labourer of his employment ; for the prohibition of all 
spinning and weaving but by hand ; for duties on all 
clothing-material, or other products, not fabricated by 
simple hand-labour. These petitions prove that, while 
the upper educated classes in Germany are going along 
with the most enlightened political economists of the 
age, in their views of freedom in all industrial move- 
ment, the mass of the people are far behind. The 
one division is ripe for the most liberal and free 
social arrangements — ripe even to rottenness ; and the 
other, the £rreat mass, is still vegetating in the Green- 
ness of the middle aires. The other fact confirming 
these views is, that the Prussian government found 



170 RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF GUILDS IN 

itself obliged to publish, on the 9th of February, 1849, 
a new Gewerbe-Gesetz, or law of handicrafts. At 
that date, a year nearly after the tumults and out- 
breaks of the class of operatives of every trade, under 
the banners of socialism in Berlin and all the principal 
cities of Germany, the Prussian government must 
have known what it was the people really desired, 
and was in no condition gratuitously to set at defiance 
the opinions or wishes of the working-classes on a 
subject of little or no direct political importance. 
This new Gewerbe-Gesetz rescinds a former law of 
1845, which, with a few restrictions incident to the 
Landwehr service, gave entire freedom to the subjects 
to exercise any trade or handicraft in any place, and 
abolished the old trade-incorporations and their ex- 
clusive privileges. This new Gewerbe-Gesetz of 1849, 
re-establishing, in consequence, it is said in the pre- 
amble, of the numerous petitions and complaints from 
allquarters, the old system of masters, journeymen, 
and apprentices in every trade, united in corporations, 
with certain terms of servitude, examinations, proofs 
of skill before being admitted to the privilege of ex- 
ercising their handicrafts; with regulations for the 
number of apprentices, journeymen, masters' shops 
for working, shops for sale of the articles, provision 
for sickness and old age, education, conduct, a com- 
mon fund, a council of the members of the trade for 
the management of the common affairs and funds, 
and with power to make by-laws ; in short, re-estab- 
lishing the whole of the ancient labour-protection 
or labour-restrictive system of guilds or incorpora- 
tions, but with many improvements. The improve- 
ments are that the class of journeymen, as well as the 
class of masters, are represented and have a voice in 



PRUSSIA ON SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES. 171 

the council of their craft, and have representatives 
equal in number to the masters, except one vote, 
which the class of masters are allowed to have more 
in the council. These new guilds, also, are under the 
control of the local civil functionaries, and not under 
the government of the masters only, and are extended 
over the whole country, and not confined to certain 
towns, and may be established, when thought necessary, 
by the local authorities. By the admission of journey- 
men they are more popularly constituted than the 
ancient guilds ; and by a common fund for relief in 
cases of sickness, want of employment, accidents, or a 
temporary inability to pay the government poll-tax, 
or Gewerb-steuer, they approach, as nearly as possible, 
to what would practically be the shape and effect of 
any scheme of socialism, or working for common sup- 
port. There is, in principle and practice, a community 
of labour and a united social working for a common 
fund, together with a beneficial property of the la- 
bourer in his own kind of labour protected by law, in 
these new guilds. They appear to have been framed 
to meet practically the requirements of the working- 
classes in Germany ; and the schemes of the socialist 
ouvrier of the Faubourg St. Antoine, reduced to any 
practical shape of reality, could take no other form 
than this revival of the social arrangements of the 
middle ages. This revival is, in effect, a realisation 
of socialism, yet bringing society round to the insti- 
tutions from which it started in the infancy of trades. 
The principle and system would, no doubt, be 
unsuitable and absurd in Great Britain, with a social 
economy and condition modified by geographical po- 
sition, natural products, climate, and other physical 
circumstances peculiar to our state ; but they may not 



172 RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF GUILDS. 

be so in the Continental countries in which the land, 
and the employment it can give, are filled up to reple- 
tion, and employment in other branches of industry is, 
from the want of those physical circumstances, limited 
and naturally incapable of very great extension. Our 
political economy is exceptional, not normal for the 
rest of the civilised world ; and we are led to the con- 
clusion that political economy is not a science, of 
which the principles or truths are, like those of all 
other sciences, equally applicable to all societies, ages, 
and circumstances, but that every country has its 
own political economy. 



THE THIRD ELEMENT IN SOCIETY. 173 



CHAP. IX. 

NOTES ON A MIDDLE CLASS BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENT AND THE 
PEOPLE. — ON THE REFORM OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF LAND IN 
PRUSSIA. FALL OF THE FEUDAL ARISTOCRACY. ESTABLISH- 
MENT OF FUNCTIONARISM AS THE THIRD ELEMENT IN THE SOCIAL 
BODY. — SPIRIT OF FUNCTIONARISM — DANGEROUS TO THE MO- 
NARCH AND THE PEOPLE. CASE OF TORTURE INFLICTED IN 

HANOVER LN 1818. — FUNCTIONARISM LN NORWAY — IN THE 
UNITED STATES. — EFFECTS OF THE FUNCTIONARY SYSTEM ON 
INDUSTRY — ON EDUCATION. 

One important question in the social state to which 
the whole Continent is tending, by the general dif- 
fusion of landed property through the social body, 
has still to be solved. It is this : — 

What is to be the third element in this new social 
state of the European people ? What is to be the 
intermediate social power between the governing and 
the governed, with influence over both, and prevent- 
ing direct collisions between the two ? Without such 
an intermediate element with social and moral in- 
fluence, society can exist only in a state of anarchy, 
or of abject submission to an uncontrolled despotism. 
In the autocracy even of Russia and of Turkey, such 
a third element between the ruler and the ruled 
may be traced in the power or influence of a body 
of great nobility in the one state, and of the Ma- 
hometan priesthood in the other. What is to be this 
third element in the new social state of western 
Europe ? Feudal aristocracy, or a class privileged 
by birth, extensive hereditary landed property, and 



174 THE THIRD ELEMENT IN SOCIETY 

its social influences, bound together as a class by 
family ties and connections, and supported by popular 
prejudice, feeling, or prestige, to take a place be- 
tween king and people, is extinct as a social power. 
Their power decayed with their property. The 
German nobility, impoverished by the expense of 
living suitably to their rank, and by living in the 
capitals or cities, at a distance from their estates, 
depend for subsistence on military or civil employ- 
ment ; and have lost, in this century, the influence 
and prestige, as well as the reality, of great landed 
possessions. The multiplication of poor nobles, from 
each son succeeding to the full title of his father, 
although without any property to maintain a suitable 
position to it in society, has reduced the whole body 
of Continental nobility, in public estimation, to a 
class of titled paupers, living on the public in useless 
offices. Aristocracy has merged into functionarism. 
It was the policy of Frederick the Great, after the 
Seven Years' War, in order to secure Silesia and his 
newly acquired dominions, to attach all the country 
nobility to his court, and make them dependent 
on civil or military function in his service. The 
young nobles were made cadets and officers ; the old 
were at least nominal chamberlains or privy coun- 
cillors. It was the old policy of France and Spain, 
to draw the nobility from their estates and country 
residences, where they were powerful and might be 
formidable, and to introduce them to the expenses, 
honours, and dependence of a court life. The revo- 
lution proved in France that this state policy had 
been carried too far. No intermediate body with 
social influence had been left in the country. Bri- 
tany and La Yendee alone had a resident influential 



BETWEEN THE EXECUTIVE AND THE PEOPLE. 175 

class of nobles or country gentlemen, who were too 
poor to be attached to a splendid and expensive 
court, and there alone was found a class to support 
the throne. A similar body of landed proprietors 
spread over France, would have mediated as a third 
element between the throne and the people, and 
might have averted the horrors and anarchy of the 
revolution. Every succeeding movement in France 
proves the want of some third element, in the social 
body, between the executive power and the people. 
To this want must be ascribed the influence of Paris 
in all social action in France. The country has no 
third element, in its present social structure, between 
the governing and the governed. Paris alone is this 
third element for all France. 

In Germany the same social results have been 
produced, in the present half century, but by a dif- 
ferent agency — by the monarchs themselves, not by 
the people. They have attempted to create a third 
social power in their own interests. 

The social state of Prussia, up to the conclusion of 
the peace of Tilsit in July 1807, was, like that of the 
rest of Germany, essentially feudal. The land was pos- 
sessed by a class of nobles who held the peasants on 
their estates as serfs or leibeigen people, adscripti glebce. 
The leibeigen peasant worked every day, or a certain 
number of days weekly, on the farm of the proprie- 
tor or his tacksman, and had a hut to live in and a 
spot of land to cultivate for his own subsistence, at 
spare hours. Another class of peasants, a little above 
the condition of Leibeigen, held a larger occupancy of 
land, for which they paid certain fixed services of 
carts, horses, and ploughs, to the proprietor or tacks- 
man, and certain payments in naturalia of the crops 



176 THE THIRD ELEMENT IN SOCIETY. 

they raised. These payments being of old standing, 
and fixed by usage at the highest rate they could 
safely or profitably be raised to, were of the nature 
of quit-rents or feu-duties, although not in general 
established by writings or feu-charters. There were 
tacksmen or middlemen, who took on lease a district 
or barony, with its village and peasants, from the 
noble proprietor, paid him a money rent, and ga- 
thered in and turned to account the labour, services, 
payments in kind, and whatever they could make out 
of the peasantry leased to them, and farmed the 
mains or demesne lands of the estate, with the labour 
of the leibeigen and the services of the other peasants. 
The same system existed in the north of Scotland 
until a late period. The nobles alone, in the greater 
part of Germany, could purchase and hold land that 
was free from such servitudes. The peasant holdings 
or feued lands, held under services, often of a per- 
sonal and even degrading kind, to the superior or 
feudal lord, were the only estates or landed properties 
that a capitalist, not born noble, could purchase or 
hold. The nobles, also, were exempt from all taxes, 
unless a personal tax, called a knight's horse, fixed 
at forty-eight thalers ; they were exempt from military 
service in person, after the general establishment of 
standing armies instead of feudal services in the field. 
They had a monopoly of the military rank of officers 
in the army, and of all civil offices in every depart- 
ment of the state. On their estates they had here- 
ditary jurisdiction ; and could punish, imprison, and 
flog their peasants for neglect of feudal services. 
They had, however, to keep a justiciary, regularly 
bred at a university and duly examined, to sit in 
their barony courts, and his judicial proceedings 



STATE OF THE SERFS IN GERMANY. 177 

were revised and controlled by independent superior 
royal courts in each district. They had, moreover, 
to support their peasants in cases of destitution from 
accidents of flood or fire, of failure of crops, of cattle- 
murrain, and to provide them with medical assistance 
and medicines in cases of sickness. The principle of 
a poor rate was thus acknowledged, even in this so- 
cial state, and the liability of the land to subsist the 
population engendered on it. The peasant could not 
remove from the estate to which he belonged, without 
leave from his lord. He might be punished as a 
deserter, and could be reclaimed from any place he 
might fly to, unless he had enlisted in the army or 
had escaped to one of the free cities, such as Ham- 
burgh, Frankfort, Lubeck, in which, after a year and 
a day's residence, he was entitled to protection. 
This was no dormant right of the middle ages to the 
property of leibeigen peasants as slaves. In Holstein 
itself, the focus of the flame for German liberty, the 
peasants were only liberated from the thraldom of 
leibeigenschaft about the beginning of the present 
century. Patroles of dragoons were kept on all the 
roads to arrest leibeigen peasants attempting to 
desert from their baronial owners and to reach Ham- 
burgh or Lubeck. This social state was obviously 
not suited to the nineteenth century, or to a struggle 
for the maintenance of feudal institutions against 
republican armies. The people had no interests to 
defend, no class even to whom they could be attached 
as their feudal lords and masters, if the spirit of the 
times had been favourable to such social ties of past 
ages ; for the nobles, like the Irish landlords of our 
days, had ceased to live on their estates, were en- 
gaged in military, civil, or court employments, were ab- 

N 



178 ABOLITION OF SERFAGE. 

sentees, in general needy, and their peasantry were in 
the hands of tacksmen (Pachters), raised originally 
from the station of peasants, and for whom the agricul- 
tural population could have no feelings of attachment, 
no prestige. It was necessary for the safety of the 
country to reconstruct society. The rights of pro- 
perty had to give place to the rights of the commu- 
nity, to security, and to a social condition worth 
defending. The first steps were taken towards a 
great social revolution, by an edict of the 9th October, 
1807, in the ministry of Stein. By the fifth para- 
graph of this edict, every landholder or vassal, was 
entitled to let, sell, or dispose of his land, farm, mill, 
or any portion or pertinent of his land, without 
hinderance or demand of dues from his feudal lord or 
superior under whom he held it. By paragraph ten, 
no difference was allowed in future, between one 
subject and another in their duties to the state, in 
respect of birth, marriage, property, or office. By 
paragraph twelve, all personal services of the class of 
serfs or leibeigen vassals, were to cease at and from 
Martinmas, 1810. 

It cannot be denied that in this edict, in itself so 
just and necessary for the very existence of society, 
there was involved a great infringement of the rights 
of property. However inconsistent with just prin- 
ciple, the rights of the feudal proprietor to the per- 
sonal services of the peasants on his land were rights 
of more than a thousand years' standing, and recognised 
in every European country. Compensation was cer- 
tainly due, and much more reasonably due to the Prus- 
sian nobles than to our West India planters on the ab- 
olition of slavery. There was an ambiguity as well as 
an injustice in this edict. Prsedial services of labour, 



FIXITY OF RENTS AND FEUDAL SERVICES. 179 

and of horses, ploughs, waggons, paid in respect of 
land were often, like the payments of certain quan- 
tities of grain, butter, and other commodities, a kind 
of rent delivered in such services, as naturalia, and 
constituting the annual rent or feu- duty for which 
the land was originally let or feued to the peasant. 
These were not abolished by the edict. But the ad- 
scriptus glebce, or leibeigen peasant, who had personal 
services to perform daily on the farm of his feudal lord, 
had necessarily a hut to live in, and a plot of land to 
cultivate for his own subsistence when not required 
to work for his master ; and his service might be 
called and construed into leibeigen-work, or work 
in payment of rent for the tenement he occupied, as 
it suited the interests of his lord, or the tacksman to 
represent it. This ambiguity had already excited 
commotions among the peasantry in Upper Silesia, 
when the difficulty was settled by another edict in 
1811. By this edict, all the other feudal services 
and burdens on land and people, not abolished by the 
former edict, were to cease in four years. This edict 
established a fixity of rent. It fixed the services or 
payments of labour, and the payments of produce in 
kind, due by the peasant in respect of his land, and 
fixed the redemption of these feudal burdens at a 
certain number of years' purchase, either by a pay- 
ment of this value at once, or by instalments; or by the 
feuar, tenant, or occupier surrendering to his feudal 
landlord (the real proprietor of his farm) a proportion 
of the land he occupied, according to a valuation, in 
order to relieve the remainder of the land of all the 
feudal services and payments, formerly exigible as 
rent or feu-duty. This latter mode of adjustment 
appears to have been the most generally adopted, as 

N 2 



180 INFRINGEMENT OF RIGHTS OF PROPERTY 

money was scarce among the class of peasants ; in- 
stalments were uncertain amidst such violent and 
sudden changes ; and the landowner got at least the 
remainder of his land laid together, so as to be avail- 
able as large farms. Commissioners were appointed 
by the government for each province, to value, regu- 
late, and adjust the interests and relations of the 
landowners and peasants on the spot, and the com- 
pensations or exchanges of land that were equitable ; 
and it is surprising with what facility, or at least with 
what promptitude, this great revolution in the state 
of landed property, and in the social structure of 
Prussia was carried into effect. The settlement of 
such complicated interests, in a way accordant with 
the intention of government to raise the condition of 
the peasantry, and give them the ties and feelings of 
proprietors with a stake in the country to defend, at 
the expense of the class of feudal nobility, could not 
have been accomplished so speedily and quietly, with- 
out the will and fiat of the autocratic sovereign 
standing in place of all discussion of principle, and 
without the universal feeling that the existing feudal 
arrangements of the country, and the feudal privi- 
leges of the nobles, the sole proprietors of the land, 
were altogether incompatible with the safety and 
defence of the country, and with the spirit of society 
in the nineteenth century. Yet the measure was a 
grave infringement of the rights of property. There 
was no option, and in reality no compensation to 
the landed proprietor for this abolition of rights, 
which, whether in accordance with abstract principle, 
natural justice, and public good, or not, were vested 
rights of a thousand years' standing, and founded on 
the same feudal principle and constitution of society 



IN PRUSSIA AS IN FRANCE. 181 

as the government that abolished them stood on itself. 
The right of a state, representing the community, to 
reconstruct the social body, and re-distribute the land 
of a country in the way most conducive to the well- 
being, real or supposed, of the mass of the population, 
without regard to the proprietory claims of a small 
class of landholders has, no doubt, been often dis- 
cussed and maintained in the speculative themes of 
schoolboys and debating societies, but never probably 
without the admission of full compensation being due 
to those despoiled for the general good, of hereditary 
property held under sanction of laws common, for a 
long succession of ages, to all Europe. None but the 
most frantic reformers, socialists, or red republicans, 
deny the right to compensation for the most necessary 
violations of property. It is therefore a singular 
meeting of extremes, and one of the most remarkable 
coincidences in our remarkable times, that the most 
autocratic of sovereigns, the late king of Prussia, 
carried on with a high hand in his dominions, between 
the years 1807 and 1811, a greater and more radical 
revolution than the most visionary reformer ever 
dreamt of, and established in Prussia the same distri- 
bution of property, and the same social state, that the 
most frantic of democrats established in France at the 
beginning of the revolution, adopting at home the 
very arrangement and construction of society which 
he had attempted during years of warfare and blood- 
shed, and at the imminent peril of his crown, to put 
down abroad. The French writer was truly a pro- 
phet who said, " the tricoloured flag was destined to 
make the tour of the world." The social structure 
and economy of the two countries, Prussia and France, 
although framed by such different hands, with such 

N 3 



182 THE PRESENT SOCIAL STATE OF 

different views, and under such different circum- 
stances, are now the same, and as if cast in the same 
mould. In both countries we see a people of small 
peasant-proprietors holding the land, no class — scarce- 
ly an individual among them — above the cares of 
daily provision for subsistence and superior to others 
in the social influence of superior industry, intelli- 
gence, extensive social action and usefulness, or in 
property, which is the exponent of these social in- 
fluences ; a numerous body of civil functionaries living 
upon this people for the performance of duties partly 
useless, partly such as a people imbued with public 
spirit would discharge for themselves in each locality, 
and extending over them, in their private affairs and 
movements, a superintendence and interference which 
a people with any sense for liberty and personal rights 
would not tolerate — a military organisation of the 
whole population — a government upheld by an army, 
and trembling before a population equal to the army 
in military spirit, experience, and the use of arms. 
Is not this the present social condition both of France 
and Prussia — the very same results from the re- 
forms of democracy in the one country, and of 
autocracy in the other ? This has not been a happy 
experiment on the reconstruction of society in either 
country; and the reason seems to be that, in both 
the principle which is the basis of all civilised society, 
viz, the sacredness of property, and of the social in- 
fluence belonging to property as the exponent of in- 
dustry, intelligence, and useful action, has been vio- 
lated — in France by the blind fury of democracy at 
the revolution, in Prussia by the blind policy or 
caprice of despotism. In France the experiment, if 
not more happy as yet in its social results, has been 



PRUSSIA AND FRANCE THE SAME. 183 

more consistently carried out. The law, by the Code 
Napoleon, is at least in accordance with the new 
state of property. In Prussia, although the basis of 
feudality is cut away by the general distribution of 
property in land, and the utter decay of the social 
influence of the class of nobles, the feudal procedure, 
courts of justice, and principles of law are still main- 
tained, and even forced upon provinces which had 
enjoyed trial by jury, open courts, and the simpler 
judicial procedure of the Code Napoleon, before their 
annexation to Prussia. In both countries, by the 
general distribution of the land through the social 
body, society has been brought back to its two pri- 
mary elements — a governing power above, and a 
governed mass below. No intermediate class to sup- 
port the governing power in its necessary rights, and 
to support the governed mass in their just require- 
ments of freedom and constitutional government, has 
yet arisen to ward off, by its social influence, the 
recourse to physical force by the people, and to 
military despotism by their rulers. 

The Continental sovereigns, after the peace, and 
settlement of Europe in 1816, appear to have felt, as 
by a common instinct, that their kingly power was 
in a false position in the new social state which the 
general diffusion of landed property had produced. 
It wanted a barrier and a support. They all at- 
tempted, as by common accord, to create a third ele- 
ment in the social structure, and to replace the class 
of nobles possessing large landed property with more 
or less of the social influence belonging to such pro- 
perty, by substituting functionarism for aristocracy 
as a support of their thrones. A numerous body, a 
civil army of functionaries organised, and in subor- 

N 4 



184 FUNCTIONAKISM, INSTEAD OF AKISTOCKACY, 

dination to chiefs of various departments, was quar- 
tered, like a military body, all over the country, 
although not required for any useful pupose or public 
benefit. Every imaginable and real social interest, 
religion, education, law, police, every branch of public 
or private business, personal liberty to move from 
place to place, even from parish to parish within the 
same jurisdiction, liberty to engage in any branch of 
trade or industry on a small or large scale, all the 
objects, in short, in which body, mind, and capital 
can be employed in civilised society, were gradually 
laid hold of for the employment and support of func- 
tionaries, were centralised in bureaux, were super- 
intended, licensed, inspected, reported upon, and 
interfered with by a host of officials scattered over the 
land and maintained at the public expense, yet with 
no conceivable utility in their duties. They are not, 
however, gentlemen at large, enjoying salary without 
service. They are under a semi-military discipline. 
In Bavaria, for instance, the superior civil functionary 
can place his inferior functionary under house-arrest, 
for neglect of duty, or other offence against civil func- 
tionary discipline. In Wiirtemberg, the functionary 
cannot marry without leave from his superior. Vol- 
taire says, somewhere, that, " the art of government 
is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly 
can pay for the benefit of the other third." This is 
realised in Germany by the functionary system. The 
functionaries are not there for the benefit of the 
people, but the people for the benefit of the func- 
tionaries. All this machinery of functionarism, with 
its numerous ranks and gradations in every district, 
filled with a staff of clerks and expectants in every 
department looking for employment, appointments, 



TO BE THE THIRD ELEMENT IN SOCIETY. 185 

or promotions, was intended to be a new support of 
the throne in the new social state of the Continent ; 
a third class, in close connection with the people by 
their various official duties of interference in all 
public or private affairs, yet attached by their in- 
terests to the kingly power. The Beamptenstand, or 
functionary class, was to be the equivalent to the 
class of nobility, gentry, capitalists, and men of larger 
landed property, than the peasant-proprietors, and 
was to make up in numbers for the want of indi- 
vidual weight and influence. In France, at the ex- 
pulsion of Louis Philippe, the civil functionaries 
were stated to amount to 807,030 individuals. This 
civil army was more than double of the military. 
In Germany, this class is necessarily more numerous 
in proportion to the population, the landwehr system 
imposing many more restrictions than the conscrip- 
tion on the free action of the people, and requiring 
more officials to manage it, and the semi-feudal juris- 
dictions and forms of law requiring much more 
writing and intricate forms of procedure before the 
courts, than the Code Napoleon. 

In every state, in modern times, functionaries are 
necessarily numerous. The collection of the public 
revenue alone requires a little army of them. But 
we would be rather surprised to hear our own Be- 
amptenstand, our collectors, comptrollers, assessors, 
tidewaiters, gaugers, considered as a high and influ- 
ential class in our social body, or considered as a 
class at all in any way distinct from the respectable 
middle class in which they are merged. In Prussia 
it is different. The kingdom is made up of pro- 
vinces torn from other powers; and to reduce the 
local influence of the nobles or great landholders, it 



186 FUNCTIONAKISM INSUFFICIENT TO 

was always the principle of the state to bring them 
into the civil or military service, to merge them into 
the functionary class. After the arbitrary division 
of Europe by the Congress of Vienna in 1816, the 
necessity of proceeding on the same principle was 
thought to be still more urgent. The people were 
torn from their ancient hereditary rulers, ancient 
jurisdictions, laws, and prejudices ; and men who had 
been born Saxon, Swedish, French subjects, were 
driven like sheep into the Prussian, Bavarian, or Baden 
folds, without more regard to their interests, feelings, 
attachments, manners, or prior allegiance, than if 
they had been a flock of sheep. The reaction of this 
demoralising partition of Germany by the Congress 
of Vienna, in 1815, has come on now, in 1848. The 
German sovereigns can scarcely accuse their subjects 
of a breach of hereditary allegiance, where they 
themselves became sovereigns by a compulsory breach 
of a prior allegiance. The heterogeneous masses of 
population, composing the subjects of the sovereigns 
of Prussia, Bavaria, Wiirtemberg, and Baden, could 
only be held together, in the semblance of nations, by 
functionary government. These masses are not na- 
tionalised, they are only functionalised. Their social 
and political affairs are managed from common 
centres, the bureaux at Berlin, Munich, Stuttgard s 
in a common functionary system ; but the people so 
united on the paper of the central bureaux, are not 
united by any common interests or feelings, or any 
intercourse with each other. In the kingdom of 
Prussia, for instance, the masses of population on the 
Ehine, have no common interests, feelings, ties, no 
mutual communications or intercourse with the 
masses on the shores of the Baltic, or on the Vistula, 



UNITE SUBJECTS INTO NATIONS. 187 

binding them together into one nation. It is the 
voice of the paid functionary through the newspaper 
press, or of a pensioned band of professors or literary 
men expectants on office, that is heard in the adu- 
lation of the Prussian government and its measures, 
and in the assurances, unnecessary if true, of the 
loyalty and enthusiasm of the Prussian nation. In 
Brandenburg, the old hereditary dominion of the 
Hohenzollern dynasty, the feeling of loyalty to the 
family may be sufficiently strong. But what has 
Pomerania to be loyal for — a country torn from the 
milder and less-meddling government of Sweden, in 
the present generation of the older inhabitants ? 
What have the three millions of people in Posen and 
Prussian Poland, the million and a half in the 
Rhenish provinces, the million and a half in West- 
phalia, and the provinces torn from Saxony and 
annexed, in 1816, to the Prussian crown, what have 
these populations to be loyal for ? Is it for being 
torn from their ancient hereditary laws, institutions, 
and governments ? Is it in Posen, Westphalia, and 
in the Rhenish provinces, for closed courts of justice, 
semi-feudal law, and a tortuous administration of it, 
instead of trial by jury, open and cheap courts of 
justice, and the Code Napoleon ? What has the 
Protestant population of Prussia to be loyal for? Is 
it for the abolition, by a royal edict, of the very name 
of Protestant applied to religion ? Is it for the per- 
secution of the Silesian Lutherans for refusing to 
accept a new liturgy of the king's own composition, 
instead of Luther's ? Is it for enforcing the ac- 
ceptance of this new church service and liturgy on 
Calvinists and Lutherans, by penalties, deprivation 
of office, quartering of troops, and imprisonment? 



188 FUNOTIONARISM INSUFFICIENT TO 

Is it for the refusal to fulfil the solemn promises 
given to the people in 1813, of a representative go- 
vernment ? Is it for a breach of the word and faith 
of a monarch by the late king of Prussia, that the 
Prussian subjects are brimful and running over with 
affection, enthusiasm, and loyalty? The European 
public are deceived by a press open only to praise 
and adulation, and by functionaries and Berlin pro- 
fessors, men of high name, no doubt, in literature, 
who are paying for their pudding in praise. The 
Prussian subjects are not a nation, but a lot of four- 
teen millions of people torn from other nationalities, 
in 1816, and held together in the shape of a nation, 
only by functionary government, civil and military 
duties, and discipline. They are the most super- 
intended, the most interfered with, the most destitute 
of civil freedom and political rights, in a word, the 
most enslaved people in western Europe, and the 
most educated. It would be an imputation on the 
German character, and a proof that the people of 
Germany are incapable of any nationality or freedom 
at all, if it were true that the great mass of Prussian 
subjects who were born and bred under, or accus- 
tomed to consider as their right the Code Napoleon, 
trial by jury, open courts of justice, and freedom of 
religion, had become, in a single generation, nation- 
alised and amalgamated with the population of old 
Prussia, and enthusiastic in loyalty to an autocratic 
sovereign who has broken his promises of a consti- 
tution, and to a government in which law, civil and 
criminal, is derived from and administered as we 
see in the trial of Waldeck, in November, 1849, in 
the spirit of the middle ages, and is far behind the law 
and administration they had enjoyed before their an- 



UNITE SUBJECTS INTO NATIONS. 189 

nexation to the Prussian crown. In France, although 
the functionary system was not necessary, as in 
Prussia, to give a semblance of nationality to uncon- 
nected masses of population, for the French people 
have long been nationalised, it was considered neces- 
sary as a means of giving stability to the power of 
each succeeding ruler, from Napoleon the emperor, 
to his nephew the president. The social state which 
had sprung up from the ashes of the revolution, 
afforded no other element between the governing and 
the governed, but what government created. Func- 
tionarism was intended to be a barrier in France, 
against the physical force of the people — a middle 
class with social influence exerted always in favour 
of the ruling power. The general movement in 1848, 
in every country governed by this bureaucracy, for 
obtaining civil freedom, liberal constitutions, and 
emancipation from the functionary system, proves 
that this is not the true intermediate element re- 
quired in the new social state into which Europe has 
entered. In countries which had constitutional go- 
vernments or representative assemblies, as Baden, 
Wurtemberg, Hesse, the movement in 1848, 1849, was 
not less violent than in the most autocratically 
governed states. The restrictions on civil liberty, 
the functionary system created for and upheld by 
those oppressive and useless restrictions on freojdom 
of action, on private life, on civil liberty, were a 
grievance which political liberty, the forms of a free 
constitution, had not redressed and never would re- 
dress, as the representatives of the people in those 
mock-parliaments were either functionaries them- 
selves or under functionary influences. Function- 
arism gave way under the feet of the sovereigns who 



190 FUNCTIONARISM BETRAYED THE 

had built it up, and trusted to it as the support of 
their thrones. It betrayed Bonaparte. It deserted 
Louis Philippe. The functionaries had no influence 
with the people. They are justly considered as de- 
pendent pensioners, living upon the public for the 
performance of functions only created for their sup- 
port, and in themselves useless, oppressive, and 
burdensome. The Continental man now visits other 
countries at a small expense of money or time, and 
finds people there managing for themselves those 
affairs and interests which employ a crowd of paid 
functionaries at home, and sees them free individually 
to move about, to settle where they please, to engage 
in what they please, in trade, manufactures, or other 
industrial pursuits, without restrictions, superinten- 
dence, leave or licence from any official of govern- 
ment. This civil liberty will be one of the great 
moral effects produced in the social state of Europe 
by steam power, and will be its greatest triumph. 
The lesson received abroad by the German and French 
travellers, will not be lost at home, and the reduction 
of functionarism to its proper limits of the collection 
of taxes, the administration of law, and the other 
legitimate objects of government, instead of the pre- 
sent system of meddling with all social or private 
action which can be centralised, superintended, and 
turned into employment for functionaries, will be the 
first and most important result of the movement of 
1848, on the social state of Germany. The vexatious 
interference and intrusion of functionarism into the 
domestic affairs and arrangements of individuals, by 
the landwehr system, the educational system, the 
passport system, the class taxes, the licences to trade 
or exercise any handicraft, have reduced civil liberty 



MONARCH'S WHO TRUSTED TO IT. 191 

or the freedom of the individual to act on his own 
judgment in his own affairs, to as low a pitch as 
in the middle ages. The movement in Germany in 
1848 was, as far as the people were concerned in 
it, to get rid of this oppression. A constitutional go- 
vernment or parliament, in the smaller German states, 
had not the power to shake it off; but an united 
central parliament for all Germany would be beyond 
and above the influences which, in a small state, 
perpetuate abuses once established. This was the 
main benefit to be expected from an united German 
government. 

In the dreary seven years of German history, from 
the peace of Tilsit in 1807 to the expulsion of the 
French in 1814, the functionary class had not proved 
themselves so faithful to the governments by which 
they were appointed, as to deserve the extension and 
importance which the Continental sovereigns gave 
them after the settlement of Europe in 1816. In 
Westphalia, in Prussia itself, and in all the countries 
of Germany occupied by the French, the established 
functionaries in every district and department of 
public affairs became the willing instruments, in the 
hands of the French, of the most grievous exactions, 
contributions, and oppressions which, without their 
assistance and organisation, could not have been 
carried into effect by the French commissaries. The 
chiefs only of a few departments had to be removed, 
or rather had to report to and act under a French 
functionary ; but almost all the effective machinery of 
functionarism remained, every man sticking to office, 
and quite as effective for the enemy as he had been 
for the sovereign of the country. No feeling of 
honour, obligation, or duty to the former sovereign, 



192 FUNCTIONARISM DANGEROUS TO KINGS. 

no regard for previous oaths of allegiance, appear to 
have stood in the way of the German functionaries 
in continuing to hold their offices and to serve under 
King Jerome, or whoever was appointed by France 
to the emolument that could be squeezed out of the 
conquered German territories. This Beamptenstand 
or functionary class wants the moral dignity of cha- 
racter which has influence with a people in times of 
social trouble, and are a dangerous machinery, not 
only ready to inflict misgovernment and oppression 
on the country, but ready to support any hero of the 
hour against the state that appointed them, who has 
the good fortune to get hold of the reins of govern- 
ment at the point in which they are centralised. It 
is an element in the social state as dangerous to the 
sovereign as it is oppressive and burdensome to the 
people. Louis Philippe was deposed and set aside 
as easily and quietly as any chef de bureau. He was 
but a chef de bureau to his people, who knew only func- 
tionaries of some bureau or other, as the leading class ; 
and to his functionaries, who knew no other motive 
of action than promotion in their several departments 
by subserviency to their immediate chiefs. Yet func- 
tion arism is the only element which has arisen in the 
new social state of Europe, as the intermediate power 
between the governing and the governed. It is evi- 
dently not the true element. In a monarchical go- 
vernment it serves neither king nor people, and it 
is dangerous to the liberty of the more democratical 
states. 

The feudal system, or that social state into which 
feudalism had settled, was never entirely eradicated 
in Germany, unless where the Code Napoleon was 
introduced by the French, as in Westphalia, the pro- 



SYSTEM OF FUNCTIONARISM. 193 

vinces of the Rhine, and in Posen. After the peace 
of 1815, the almost obsolete power of interference 
with the personal freedom, industry, time, and labour 
of the individual, was revived, and transferred from 
the feudal lord, in whom it was but a dormant right 
under the French regime, to the state and its func- 
tionaries. The landwehr service takes more of the 
common man's time and labour from him than the 
feudal services he had to pay before to his landowner 
for his house and land, and his thraldom under the 
local functionaries, civil and military, is now as com- 
plete and oppressive as in the middle ages under the 
feudal baron. The new functionary system does not 
even remove the abuses of the old feudal system, but 
amalgamates itself with it and throws the burden of 
both on the people. The administration of civil and 
criminal law, the courts of justice, the hereditary 
jurisdictions of nobles on their estates, with courts, 
prisons, forest laws, and all the dregs of feudalism, 
are still allowed (or were so, until the movements of 
1848 against the present social state of Germany) to 
poison the existence of the common man. An in- 
stance of the state of the law in the most enlightened 
part of Germany, will best illustrate the abject state 
of the people after the settlement of Europe by the 
Vienna congress, the tyranny and spirit of the func- 
tionary class placed over them, and the utter indif- 
ference of the petty German sovereigns to any reform 
or improvement of the old feudal practices in the 
administration of law revived by the public func- 
tionaries. In the year 1818, in the city of Hanover, 
under the reign of our own gracious sovereign 
George IV., in the night-time, between the 25th and 

o 



194 CASE OF TORTURE IN HANOVER. 

26th of March— it is right to give date and circum- 
stance of so atrocious a case — a person of the name 
of Sodeke was, by order of the judicial functionaries, 
after eighteen months' imprisonment, put to the 
torture to make him confess his guilt ; and after his 
hands had become dreadfully swollen by the applica- 
tion of the thumb- screw, he was at last, by the re- 
newed application of the instruments of torture, forced 
to confess his guilt. And what was his guilt ? Was 
it treason, parricide, or some unheard of combination 
of crimes of the deepest dye ? It was stealing a 
cow! This fact occurred but thirty years ago. It 
is within possibility that the same lawyers and func- 
tionaries who ordered, sanctioned, and witnessed the 
torturing of this poor wretch in the prison at Hanover, 
may now be sitting in the National Assembly at 
Frankfort or Erfurt, settling the rights and privi- 
leges of the free and equal German people. The 
public functionaries in Hanover are as highly edu- 
cated and as humane as those of any other part of 
Germany. The individuals are not so much to blame 
as the system of functionarism, the want of progress 
in humane civilised feeling with the progress of the 
age, the want of responsibility to public opinion, the 
want of that moral sense which would lead the civil 
functionary with us to resign his office, rather than 
order, sanction, or witness the infliction of torture. 
The German people have nothing to expect from par- 
liaments of functionaries bred in a school of military 
obedience, superintendence, meddling and managing 
in all private action, and in which personal advance- 
ment in office is the object of all, and subservience to 
the will and order of the ruling power, whatever that 
may be, is the means. Neither the sovereign nor 



FUNCTIONARISM IN NORWAY. 195 

the people can be served by this bureaucracy, which 
is, in reality, master of both. 

Two countries in the social arrangement towards 
which the Continent is tending, Norway and the 
United States of America, have, by the instinctive 
wisdom which guides nations when public judgment 
is in free action, seen and endeavoured to provide 
against the danger even of that amount of functiona- 
rism which is indispensably necessary in every coun- 
try for conducting the affairs of government, and 
have aimed at the same end by opposite means. In 
Norway, which enjoys the most liberal, or rather 
democratic of political constitutions in Europe, the 
functionary once appointed has, by the ground-law of 
the constitution, a property, a vested right in his 
office. He cannot be dismissed by the executive 
power or its departments, without a trial and sen- 
tence by an independent branch of the state. He 
cannot be removed from one locality to another, with- 
out his own consent. His income cannot be dimi- 
nished, nor his duties increased, without adequate 
compensation. He cannot be passed over in his turn 
for promotion. For all these rights he has a court to 
appeal to, which is entirely independent of the execu- 
tive, the legislative, or the department in which he 
serves. In every department of the state all vacan- 
cies must be published in the gazette ; lists of the 
candidates for appointments or for promotion must 
be kept ; and the list, with the reasons for the prefer- 
ence given to the successful candidate, must be laid 
before a committee of their parliament, who scrutinise 
every case and reverse an}' injustice done in the 
promotion, cancel the unjust appointment, and fine 
severely the head of the department who committed 

o 2 



196 FUNCTIONARISM IN NORWAY, 

or allowed it. The tendency of function arism to 
become a machinery in the hands of the executive 
branch of the state for undue influence or misgovern- 
ment, is checked by thus giving the functionary an 
independent personal estate in his office, and a right, 
independent of the favour of his superiors, to his 
promotion if he deserve it. The system works well 
in the limited circle of Norwegian affairs. We see 
functionaries speaking, voting, writing, and taking a 
leading place, in opposition to, or in favour of, mea- 
sures of government as freely as other people ; and, 
during the reign of Bernadotte, which was a per- 
petual struggle to undermine or overturn the consti- 
tution and establish autocracy, this independent body 
of functionaries was the third element between the 
kingly power and the population of peasant-proprie- 
tors, keeping both in their right constitutional places. 
In the United States of America, the danger of func- 
tion arism to a free state is counteracted in a way 
directly the reverse. To avoid permanent, or even 
long occupation of office, is the principle of their so- 
cial policy. The functionary, from the president 
down to the village postmaster or custom-house 
officer, is removed every four years, and returns 
with those who appointed him into private life. This 
is so much the rule in their social arrangements, that 
even the judges on the bench do not hold their seats 
for life. M. de Tocqueville, and other philosophical 
writers who have treated of the social state of Ameri- 
ca, deplore this perpetual change of public functiona- 
ries even in offices in which long experience, training, 
and study are necessary, or considered in Europe to 
be so, for the proper discharge of the duties. But 
those great writers, bred under function arism, forget 



AND IN THE UNITED STATES. 197 

that this very system of changing the whole body of 
functionaries, even in the lowest offices with each 
change of a president, is practically one of the main 
safeguards of the American constitution. If a func- 
tionary class, similar to that of France or Prussia, 
were allowed to take root, grow up, and become per- 
manent in America, the power which appointed them, 
and distributes these places and promotions, the 
president, or highest state power, who has about 
60,000 offices in his gift, would become permanent 
also, having such a fixed permanent machinery, and 
its valuable patronage and influence in every locality, 
to uphold it at every election, — the republic would 
become an oligarchy of a few heads of departments, 
and a chief supported by a numerous body of per- 
manent functionaries — a government like that of 
France, or Prussia, a bureaucracy for the benefit of the 
governing, not of the governed. They forget, too, the 
important fact, that in all the affairs of the United 
States, men of ordinary education and common sense 
have shown themselves capable of discharging very 
ably all those public functions and official affairs, 
which in Europe are supposed, from their being 
wrapped up in forms and etiquette of procedure, to 
require long training in the bureaux of ministers, 
very great experience, and much previous study. 
The Americans have proved, in the cabinet and in 
the field, that all this false importance claimed by 
men of office and routine, vanishes, in the manage- 
ment of public affairs, before sound common sense 
and energy. In their foreign diplomacy, American 
ministers fresh from the counting-house, the printing- 
office, or the farm, conduct important negotiations 
at least as successfully as the regularly trained ;im- 

o 3 



198 EFFECTS OF FUNCTIONARISM ON 

bassadors of the old European countries. American 
statesmen and generals have proved themselves equal 
to those bred in courts and on parades, in bureaux 
and at grand reviews. Functionaries create the sci- 
ence by which they live, out of their own forma- 
lities of office and routine of action ; but this science 
vanishes in the grasp of men of vigorous common 
sense applied without delicacy or ceremony to the 
business in hand. 

The direct effects of functionarism have undoubt- 
edly reduced the people of Germany to a state of 
pupilage. Independent action is so little thought of 
that it may be doubted whether, if they had a parlia- 
ment, they could use it and produce any practical 
measure of reform in their social state, without func- 
tionary guidance. They are not accustomed to act 
for themselves. The indirect effects of the system 
have deteriorated the character and retarded the in- 
dustry and prosperity of the German people, as much 
as its direct working on the social body. The num- 
bers of small functionaries provided for at the public 
expense, in the departments of the law, the finance, 
the Church, the educational affairs, the police, the 
landwehr establishment, the passport establishment, 
and all the other branches of public business spring- 
ing from the principle of the state's interference in 
all social and individual action, keep almost the 
whole youth of the country in a state of dependence 
upon favour for an appointment in some public office, 
instead of depending upon industry and exertion in 
the useful arts or occupations. Every second or third 
young man in the middle class is an expectant of 
office. The father of a family in any thriving line of 
business or trade, whose sons might with advantage 



THE SOCIAL STATE OE GERMANY. 199 

be tradesmen, manufacturers, or merchants, with the 
little capital he could give them, and who in the 
same social position with us, would undoubtedly put 
out his sons in some branch of industry, sends them, 
almost invariably, to study at a university in order 
to be qualified for office, After the bread- studies, as 
they are called in Germany, are gone through, the 
young man hangs on, often for many years, an idle 
expectant on office, and may possibly get some em- 
ployment at last in a government bureau, at a salary 
which can only help to maintain him, along with the 
little allowance the father can afford him. A great 
proportion of the small capitals gathered by trades- 
men, shopkeepers, farmers, functionaries, clergymen, 
and others in the middle station of life, is thus ex- 
pended without being utilised. The same capitals 
with us would be applied to extending the business 
in which they were acquired, or in placing the sons 
in some similar business. Such small beginnings of 
saved capital are with us the foundations of almost 
all the commercial and manufacturing prosperity of 
eminent individuals, and of the acuteness of mind and 
the judgment which produce that prosperity. Here, in 
Germany, these beginnings of capital are applied to 
supporting the sons at a university, half-students, 
half- vagrants, for many idle years ; and then in sup- 
porting them in some inferior office in a state depart- 
ment, until, by seniority, favour, or merit, a higher 
step is attained with a salary on which the functionary 
can subsist. The prospect of office in the vast func- 
tionary system turns away the industry and capital 
that might be employed with more advantage to the 
country and the individual in the humbler paths of 
trade. One advantage, however, if it be an advan- 

o 4 



200 EFFECTS OF FUNCTIONARISM ON 

tage, springs from this course of life of the middle 
class. To hold any function in civil affairs an edu- 
cation at a university is required. A literary culture 
and many accomplishments and attainments in sci- 
ence and the fine arts are diffused by this connection 
between university education and civil function, and 
are found in lower classes of society than with us. 
The youths who would, in England, be plying the 
hammer and the file, and considering themselves in 
their proper vocation if they are earning fair wages 
by their industry, are philosophers, politicians, and 
poets, in Germany, cultivating their taste in the fine 
arts, or their knowledge in various sciences, w T hile 
waiting for some office which affords them a less 
income and less independence than the earnings of 
the industrious English mechanic. It is curious to 
observe this difference of education between English 
and German people in the same rank of life, and the 
different results in each country. The young men 
of the middle class with us are, from their sixteenth 
year, in the counting-house, warehouse, or work- 
shop, giving their minds entirely to their trade or 
business, thinking of nothing else, and strangers to 
philosophy, literature, or refined accomplishments. 
Yet their intellectual culture is not dormant ; for 
they are acquiring experience, judgment, and the 
habits of acting with, and acting upon, their fellow- 
men. They come out of this training in the school 
of real business, into the world of social and political 
affairs, with minds well exercised and capable of 
wielding very often as statesmen or members of par- 
liament, the weightiest national interests with good 
sense and practical judgment. Our Humes, Cobdens, 
Brights, have had no other schooling. The Conti- 



EDUCATION AND USEFUL LIFE. 201 

nental youth of the same class go, about the same 
age, to the university, and come out of their training- 
philosophers, theorists, dreamers, and attach them- 
selves to some department of public business, in which 
they are formed into state functionaries incapable of 
thinking or acting out of the conventional forms and 
routine of the offices they are bred in. The practical 
education in the affairs of real life is more adapted to 
our social state, and seems to produce more distin- 
guished public men, than the more literary and specu- 
lative education of the youth of the Continent. In 
France and Germany, the constituent assemblies at 
Paris and Frankfort, composed of philosophers, men 
of high literary reputation for profound learning and 
talent, made a very sorry figure in 1848, 1849. They 
wasted eighteen or twenty months listening to spoken 
pamphlets of their learned members, upon abstract 
principles of social existence, and vague generalities 
of what ought to be in a perfect constitution. In 
Germany, this speculative spirit has ruined the cause 
it espoused. The public mind grew weary of the 
endless discussion of theories, and the waiting for a 
practical constitution. The German mind is generally 
in an ague, in a hot or a cold fit. The hot fit for 
German unity, a central constitutional German power 
and a parliament, has passed away like the hot fit a 
few years ago for Ronge's German catholic Church, 
and has been succeeded by a cold fit, in which all 
that agitated the public mind but a few weeks before 
is regarded as a feverish dream. The want of men 
educated in the world, and formed in the school of 
real affairs, and the preponderance of men of specula- 
tive philosophic minds, professors, scholars, men of 
the highest talents and attainments in literature and 



202 THE EDUCATIONAL FUNCTIONARISM 

science, but without practice, judgment, or decision 
in the management even of the most ordinary business 
of society, will account for the trifling and mismanage- 
ment of the Frankfort constituent assembly, and for 
the characteristic tendency of the German people to 
theory without action. They lay an egg, and cackle 
around it as a glorious production, and want the 
capability of hatching it. 

The functionarism of education, the centralisation 
under a department of government of all educational 
establishments, from the University down to the 
A, B, C school, the appointment of all teachers, masters, 
and professors by the state, and the requirement that 
all who teach shall have gone through a certain course 
of education and examination, and the prohibition of 
all teaching or school-keeping by any other than those 
licensed, approved of, educational functionaries, has 
turned out to be a branch of the functionary system, 
dangerous to the state, and injurious to the character 
of the people. It has enabled a conclave of professors 
at the German universities to form the public mind 
on their own views and theories in politics, philo- 
sophy, and legislation, to indoctrinate all the youth of 
Germany, all who are to be the public functionaries, 
from the highest to the lowest, all the clergy, all the 
lawyers, all the schoolmasters and teachers, all of 
whom must pass through their hands as students, to 
be qualified for office, with the same wild theories 
and speculations in religion, philosophy, and political 
and social science. The youth come out of this pre- 
paratory formation of mind for real life, imbued with 
the very same opinions on all subjects, slaves of the 
lamp of one genie, in philosophy, in religious, political, 
or literary opinion, and absorbed in exertions to un- 



DANGEROUS TO THE STATE AND PEOPLE' 203 

derstand the mysticism of other minds. This system 
has given a dreaming habit of mind to a great pro- 
portion of the German youth ; an aptitude to be led 
by theory, fancy, and speculation, rather than by 
judgment. It is imminently dangerous to the state, 
because public opinion is not formed by the public, 
but by a junta of professors, who have the formation 
of the public mind. The state has lost hold of the 
threads by which it was to guide the public through 
an educational system under a minister for educa- 
tional affairs. The ministers, and all under them, 
are formed as students in a school of political theories, 
over which the government has no control, for the 
members of government are themselves formed in 
this school ; yet, from the want of educational free- 
dom, no counteracting opinions can be formed in the 
public mind, however impracticable, unsuitable, or 
dangerous these professorial opinions and theories 
may be. 

But the educational system of Germany is so closely 
connected with the functionary system, and so in- 
fluential both on the governments and the people, 
and is so ignorantly held up as a system to be adopted 
in this country, because it does undoubtedly diffuse a 
certain amount and kind of education, that the sub- 
ject requires a long, and perhaps a tedious note for 
itself. 



204 THE GEEMAN STUDENTS : 



CHAP. X. 

NOTES ON THE GERMAN STUDENTS, OR BURSCHENSCHAFT. — NUM- 
BERS AT THE PRUSSIAN AND SCOTCH UNIVERSITIES COMPARED. 
— EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF THE GERMAN AND SCOTCH UNIVER- 
SITIES DIFFERENT IN ITS OBJECT AND RESULTS FROM THAT OF 

THE ENGLISH. WHY THE GERMAN STUDENTS ARE CONSIDERED 

DANGEROUS TO THE ESTABLISHED GOVERNMENTS. THE RE- 
STRICTIONS ON THE FREEDOM OF TEACHING THROW PUBLIC 
OPINION AND SOCIAL ACTION INTO THE HANDS OF THE PROFES- 
SORS AT THE UNIVERSITIES. THE WAR WITH DENMARK WAS 

PRODUCED BY THIS SOCIAL POWER. 

We hear and read so much about the students at the 
German universities, the Burschenschaft, as a distinct 
and formidable political body — so much about their 
dress, appearance, habits, and student life — about 
their drinking, swaggering, duelling, extravagance in 
low debauchery, and exultation in their extravagance 
— so much, too, about their clubs, secret associations 
and opinions dangerous to the state, which the German 
sovereigns endeavour in vain to discover and sup- 
press, that the traveller in Germany makes it one of 
the first subjects of his inquiries — what is this body — 
this Burschenschaftf The class of students at our 
universities, either in England or Scotland, are of no 
more social or political importance than the class of 
journeymen tailors, journeymen bakers, or any other 
class of young men. They are the same in the eye of 
law and police, and have no indulgence or extra per- 
mission because they are students, to disregard or 



WHAT IS THEIR REAL SOCIAL IMPORTANCE? 205 

infringe on either. They form no distinct corps, and 
are never thought of, even in the smallest university- 
town in Scotland, as a class in the social body dif- 
ferent from the other inhabitants in manners, way of 
living, opinions, importance, or privileges. How is it 
that the body of German students stands in such a very 
different social position in Germany ? They must surely 
be much more numerous in proportion to the rest of 
the population than students are with us; yet in 
Scotland, at least, the expense of a university educa- 
tion is so moderate, and the prizes to which it leads 
in the Church, in the law, in official, commercial, and 
educational employments and medical appointments, 
both at home and in our colonies, are so many and 
valuable, that it is not easy to see why the students 
should be fewer, or should be of less social importance 
in our social body than in any Continental country. 
Our universities in Scotland, too, are on the same 
footing as those of Germany. The students lodge in 
the town, attend lectures at the halls of the university, 
are examined for their academical degrees, after an 
attendance of three, four, or more years, and on cer- 
tain courses of lectures, and pay for the courses they 
attend, exactly as in Germany. The Scotch univer- 
sities, also, like the German, are situated in towns of 
various magnitudes, two in large cities, Glasgow and 
Edinburgh ; one in a large town, Aberdeen ; and one 
in a very small town, St. Andrew's. It must either 
be that the number of students in Germany is enor- 
mously great, and the Burschensdiaft, or corps of 
students, a body really formidable to the German go- 
vernments ; or that the governments must have some- 
thing to do, something for its functionaries to watch 
over and be busy about, and thus the class of students, 



206 PROPORTION OF STUDENTS TO POPULATION 

or Bursclienschaft may have been magnified into a 
false importance. To get at the truth of this ques- 
tion, let us take Prussia, the most educated, or at 
least the most educating of European countries, the 
most jealous of clubs, secret associations, and political 
agitation among her students, and withal the most 
governed by a busy, meddling bureaucracy, and see 
what proportion her Bursclienschaft and population 
bear to each other, compared to the students and 
population of Scotland. 

In 1837, Prussia contained 14,098,125 inhabitants, 
and 6 universities, in which the numbers of students 
and professors were as follow : — 

At Berlin 1585 students, and 143 professors. 

At Bonn 657 students, and 72 professors. 

At Breslaw 721 students, and 73 professors. 

At Konigsberg 379 students, and 57 professors. 

At Halle 638 students, and 62 professors. 

At Greifswald 218 students, and 40 professors. 

Of these 4198 students, 667 were foreigners, that 
is, not Prussian subjects, and at Berlin 402, or more 
than one fourth of the students, were foreigners. The 
universities of Breslaw and Bonn are mixed uni- 
versities of catholics and protestants, with students 
and professors of both persuasions ; but the youth 
studying for the catholic priesthood have distinct 
seminaries in various parts of the kingdom. The 
mixed universities for secular education are not ob- 
jected to by the Roman catholic clergy in Prussia, 
although so violently opposed in Ireland. They are 
not denounced by the priests and condemned by the 
prelates and the pope, as godless universities, to which 
pious catholics ought not to send their youth ; and 



IN PRUSSIA AND IN SCOTLAND. 207 

the reason seems to be, that in Germany, education is 
so highly valued, that the opposition of the catholic 
priesthood would be fruitless. The 447 professors 
are paid, as in Scotland, partly by government or by 
ancient endowment, and partly by the fees of the 
students for each course of lectures. 

In 1837, the population of Scotland may be taken 
in round numbers at 2^ millions. It was 2,365,114 
persons six years before, at the census of 1831. Now, 
if the 14 millions of people in Prussia, had 4198 
students, the 2 ^millions in Scotland ought to have 750 
students to be on a level in education with the highly 
and generally educated Prussian people. But instead 
of 750 students as her educational quota, Scotland, in 
one of her universities alone, has in ordinary years 
almost double of that number. Can it be that the 
vaunted educational means and superiority of Prussia 
have no foundation, but in the self-delusion and vanity 
of her own professors and statistical writers, who look 
at themselves only, until they fancy themselves big, 
and beautiful, and unequalled in the educated world? 
The aggregate number of students at the four Scotch 
universities is stated by Professor Napier, in the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica, article Scotland, to be 
usually about 2900, of whom the university of Edin- 
burgh has, on an average, 1300, that of Glasgow 
1100, and the rest are divided between Aberdeen and 
St. Andrew's. Instead of such a glorious staff as 447 
professors — about 1 professor to every 9 students — 
to trumpet the praises of the educational system of 
Prussia — the four Scotch universities can boast only 
of 87 professors — about 1 to every 33 students — and 
of these many have no income at all from government 
or from ancient endowment, and have no monopoly 



208 NUMBER OF STUDENTS IN ALL GERMANY. 

even of teaching their own branches of science in 
their own university town. The trade is free. 

If, instead of Prussia, we take all Germany, and 
compare the number of students in the population 
with the number in the Scotch population, we come 
to a similar result. Besides the six Prussian univer- 
sities, we find in Germany the following eleven, with 
the following numbers of students in 1835, an aver- 
age year : — 

Erlangen 249 students, Heidelberg 510, Wurtz- 
burg 385, Freyburg 447, Munich 1400, Gottingen 
904, Jena 454, Leipsic 1101, Kiel, Marburg, Giessen 
767. These, amounting in an ordinary year to 6216 
students, with the 4198 students in the six Prussian 
universities, make a grand total of 10,414 students 
for all Germany, with a population of 40 millions. 
The 2^ millions of Scotch people would only have to 
produce 650 students, instead of her 2900, to be on a 
par with all Germany, in university education. Scot- 
land might suppress the universities of Edinburgh and 
Glasgow altogether, and still be very little short of 
a quota of students equal, in proportion to her popu- 
lation, to that of Germany. We seem, after all, not 
to be so very much behind the rest of the world in 
educational means and the use of them, as some 
writers would persuade us. 

But what do these statistical facts prove ? That 
Scotland is a better- educated country than Germany? 
Or that attendance on universities is a test of the 
educational or enlightened condition of a people ? 
By no means. They only prove that in science, lite- 
rature, knowledge, and all the intellectual acquire- 
ments which education can give, supply follows 
demand, as surely as in the humblest physical wants 



THE SCOTCH UNIVERSITIES. 209 

— as surely as the supply of sugar, coffee, linen, 
leather, together with dealers and tradesmen to work 
up these material objects for human use, follow the 
effective remunerating demand for them. The de- 
mand for educated labour happens to be greater, 
in proportion to the population, in Scotland than 
in Prussia or in Germany. Nothing else can be 
legitimately deduced from these facts. The Presby- 
terian Church requires a university education of all 
its ministers in every sect or division. The higher 
branches of the legal and medical professions require 
the same qualification in their members. The colo- 
nies, India, the army, the navy, and the numberless 
vast establishments, commercial and manufacturing, 
scattered over the globe by British capital and energy, 
create a boundless demand for that kind of educated 
labour which the Scotch universities can supply : and 
from the students forming no class or body in any way 
distinct from other young men, it is not incompatible 
nor unusual for the clerk, the apprentice, the son of 
the manufacturer, tradesman, or farmer, to attend a 
course of lectures at the university, on chemistry, 
agriculture, or any science connected with his future 
business. It is not unusual to see elderly gentlemen 
retired from active life, or even returned from India, 
refreshing their minds by taking a course of lectures 
at the university, and the eminent professors are 
seldom without several of this class of students, as 
well as of shop-boys and clerks, attending their 
lectures. 

This perfect freedom in educational life and busi- 
ness, and the amalgamation of the students with all 
other classes without distinction or difference, not 
only makes the attainment of a university education 

p 



210 SUPPLY AND DEMAND OF EDUCATED 

more common and easy in Scotland than in Germany, 
but keeps the supply and demand in the Scotch 
market for educated intellectual labour as near to a 
perfect balance, as the supply and demand in the 
market for butcher's meat or pig-iron. The young 
men at our universities, who see no prospect of any 
opening for them in the Church, the law, or the 
medical profession, do not, as in Germany, continue 
hanging on for many years at home or about the 
universities, waiting in idleness for some appointment 
under government for which their degree and cha- 
racter at the university give them a qualification and 
a kind of claim, but engage in some other way of 
living. Our government fortunately does not attach 
qualification, or any preference even for office, to 
academical degrees ; and even in public opinion, the 
fitness for important practical management of great 
interests is by no means measured by the learning or 
academical honours of the individual. The near ad- 
justment of the supply to the demand in the free 
trade market of intellectual or educated labour in 
Scotland, was clearly shown at the disruption of the 
free Church from the established Church. There were 
not theological candidates enough in Scotland to fill 
up the vacancies suddenly produced in the churches 
of the establishment, and many charges remained un- 
filled for a considerable time, and some were filled by 
ministers brought back from Canada, or removed from 
chapels of ease to parochial charges. Yet the va- 
cancies did not amount to more than about one third 
of the body of ministers — about 370 ministers re- 
tired out of a body of parochial clergy of about 1100. 
The supply had evidently adjusted itself to the or- 
dinary average demand. This is very different from 



LABOUR IN SCOTLAND AND IN PRUSSIA. 211 

the result of the educational arrangements in Prussia, 
where for every 100 livings in the Church, it is stated 
there are 262 qualified theological candidates. In 
Germany it is not only in the legal, medical, and 
clerical professions, that a permission to exercise 
them founded on a university education and degree, 
must be obtained from government; but almost all 
occupations that are not military, and the military 
have their own schools and examinations, require the 
academical qualification. The departments of finance, 
of the royal or state domains, of roads and bridges, of 
the mines, of the woods and forests, of the revenue, 
of the revision and administration of local or general 
affairs, the hereditary jurisdictions, of which there are 
6154 private or baronial courts, besides 7018 courts 
of royal or general jurisdiction, each with its staff of 
judges, procurators, advocates, and writers, the edu- 
cational department with its universities, classical and 
real schools, gymnasia, progymnasia, seminaries, nor- 
mal schools, all requiring from the functionaries or 
candidates a university education and degree, fur- 
nish an immense market for educated labour. Yet 
with all this employment for persons bred at the 
universities, the supply greatly exceeds the demand. 
It was reckoned that in Prussia in 1835, for every 
100 livings in the Church, there were, as above stated, 
262 candidates; for every 100 juridical offices, 256 
candidates; for every 100 medical appointments, 194 
candidates ; and it is to be observed, that not merely 
the medical officers of the army or hospitals are ap- 
pointed by government, but the physician, surgeon, 
or apothecary, in private practice in towns or in the 
country, must be licensed to practise in his locality, 
and holds, in reality, a government appointment. 



212 EDUCATION FOSTERED AT THE 

These facts show, that small as the proportion is of 
the Prussian, compared to the Scotch population, who 
attend the universities, and great as the encourage- 
ment is that the Prussian government gives to educated 
labour, the proportion is by far too great for the 
natural demand, or for the real benefit of the country, 
the unemployed surplus being, in fact, literary idlers 
abstracted from the paths of productive employment, 
and hanging on in expectation of preferment to office. 
It is education fostered at the expense of industry. 
The young man, who with us would be in the count- 
ing-house, or at the turning-lathe, or spinning-jenny, 
in his father's factory, is turning verses, or spinning 
philosophical theories, while waiting, at the university 
or at home, for a tax-gatherer's place. The accu- 
mulation of this class of educated idlers beyond any 
employment government can give them, is easily 
accounted for, when we consider that vacancies to be 
filled up can only occur by the deaths among those 
already employed, who are men in the flower of life, 
while the body of candidates for those offices is re- 
newed every three years, or from three to seven years, 
according to the period of attendance required at the 
university for obtaining a degree. The proof of these 
observations is, that in Prussia, as trade and industry 
increase, the attendance at the universities decreases. 
The number of students, for example, at Halle in 
1830 was 1161, but in 1835 only 638 ; at Breslau in 
1830 they were 1132, but in 1835 only 721, and in 
the other universities of Germany the same decrease 
of students took place as the countries were advancing 
in trade and industry. At Munich the numbers fell 
from 2000 in 1830, to 1400 in 1835, and at Got- 
tingen from 1500 to 904. Dr. Carl Yenturini, the 



EXPENSE OF USEFUL INDUSTRY. 213 

sagacious chronicler of this half century, ascribes this 
falling off of the number of students at all the German 
universities to the true cause, not, as some professors 
suppose, to the want of due encouragement to lite- 
rature on the part of the governments, but to the 
material interests having overcome the intellectual in 
most parts of Germany, and the young men beginning 
to find out that they can bestow their time and talents 
better in the ordinary pursuits of industry, than in 
waiting for a poor church living, or a miserably paid 
civil function, or a medical practice which they cannot 
extend, or even for a professorial chair. In Scotland 
the universities thrive just in proportion to the thriv- 
ing state of the country. In Germany it is exactly 
the reverse. It is when beneficial employment in 
trade and productive industry is not to be found, 
that government employment is most sought after 
by a qualification at the universities; and times of 
a great affluence of students at all the universities, 
indicate times of great depression and stagnation in 
all affairs and interests, in all industrial pursuits, and 
all means of living. 

Education in Germany, as in Scotland, is different 
in its principle from education in England. What 
do the English people mean when they send their 
boys, at ten years of age, to eminent schools, and in 
due time to Oxford or Cambridge, and then bring 
them home at twenty-three or twenty-four years of 
age, to enter on their future professions or paths of 
life, whatever these may be, according to their pros- 
pects or fortunes ? Do these English parents act 
wisely or foolishly? What a silly ignorant lad their 
young man appears to be, with his prosody or his 
algebra, his longs and shorts, or his plus and minus, 

P 3 



214 DIFFERENT PRINCIPLE OF THE ENGLISH 

his mathematics or his Greek and Latin, and with 
his fine fellows, his reading men, or his sporting men 
of his college! What a foolish figure he cuts beside a 
Continental or a Scotch lad of the same age, from the 
universities, who knows something of half a dozen 
sciences, something of half a dozen languages, has 
some knowledge of chemistry, natural philosophy, 
political economy, metaphysics, talks well on geo- 
logy, and all the fashionable speculations of the day, 
and is acquainted with history, literature, and politics, 
and is master of many gentlemanly accomplishments ! 
But wait a little. Take the two young men some 
ten or twelve years afterwards. The German or 
Scotch lad is, in general, still where he was at nine- 
teen, still but a lad in mind, still a babbler on the 
surface of every subject. The English bred lad has 
gone to his profession or to his station in private or 
public life with very little positive knowledge to show 
for his education, but with a mind well exercised, 
although, perhaps, on very useless or foolish things, 
and capable of a severe and intense application to 
the subject before it, and just, perhaps, because it has 
been exercised and trained on things dull, dry, and 
unattractive, and which require patient thinking, or 
indeed mental drudgery, to acquire them. What 
have been the most serious studies of the Scotch or 
German bred student, are now his relaxations. He 
gathers in, hand over hand, the popular branches 
of knowledge, the modern languages, and the more 
abstruse sciences. These are not fatiguing studies 
to a mind trained to patient application and thinking. 
In law, in political affairs, in commerce and ordinary 
business, he enters with intellectual powers which 
seem almost intuitively to grasp the right views 



AND SCOTCH OR GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 215 

and the necessary knowledge of the subject before 
him. The two men, at thirty years of age, are pro- 
digiously different. 

The long period which the student on the Con- 
tinent must pass before he can get an appointment, 
enables a great many of superior minds to go deeper 
into philosophy and science than the superficial ac- 
quirements of the class-room student ; but this long 
period does not form a practical reflective turn of 
mind. It produces a man of theory and specu- 
lation, not of active habits. The Scotch university 
education, attempting to teach a science in a course 
of lectures, can only produce superficial men. The 
English universities, which do not profess to teach 
any thing at all, but merely to exercise and train the 
intellectual powers in studies, classical or mathema- 
tical, which are a valuable means, but are not held 
out as a valuable end, seem the more sensible and 
rational institutions. They accomplish what they pro- 
fess, and give habits of application and correct rea- 
soning to their students. The German and Scotch 
universities do not accomplish what they profess. 
The Scotch universities are, at least, innocent institu- 
tions, and indispensable, perhaps, for medical science. 
The German universities are, at present, red-hot foci 
of exaggerated theories and political speculations, not 
seats of useful education. 

The German universities were, no doubt, well ad- 
apted to the times in which they were instituted, to 
the middle ages or the first dawn of science, when in- 
struction was almost entirely oral, books and scholars 
rare, and the law, the Church, and the universities 
themselves, gave the only employment, reward, or 
distinction to the student or the man of scientific 

p 4 



216 TEACHING SCIENCES IN LECTUKES. 

attainment. The diffusion of knowledge and intel- 
lectual movement by the press, and by that peculiar 
feature of our age, the application of science to the 
useful arts, has reduced the efficiency of those uni- 
versities which propose to teach the sciences in lec- 
tures, almost to an absurdity. In the present state 
of science, a man pretending to teach any one science, 
physical or intellectual, to 120 pupils in 120 hours, 
is like the wizard of the north putting a tomtit's egg 
into his magic box, and in two minutes producing 
from it a full-grown goose. Yet, this is precisely 
the position of the most able Scotch or German pro- 
fessor, doing faithfully his utmost, in a six months' 
course of lectures, of an hour a day, for five days of 
the week, to impart a science to a class of lads, each 
of whom has at least two, and often three other 
sciences to learn, that is, classes to attend, during the 
same half-year. Considerably more time and men- 
tal application are bestowed on the instruction of a 
carpenter or a plumber and glazier in his trade, than 
on the instruction of a student at a university, in 
his science. It is the system that is in fault, not 
the teachers. The professors are unquestionably 
men of the highest attainments in their respective 
branches, but what can they teach in 120 hours 
in the present extended and daily accumulating 
knowledge in every branch of science ? The time 
would scarcely suffice to run over, in the most cur- 
sory way, the history of its progress, the various 
systems and opinions that have prevailed, and the 
improvements and alterations that have been adopted. 
If not the interests of sciences, the much higher ob- 
jects, the peace, order, and well-being of society, re- 
quire the abolition of the present system of German 



FALSE EDUCATION OF THE PUBLIC MIND. 217 

universities, by which the youth, the public func- 
tionaries, the whole legislative and administrative 
machinery of the state and education of the people, 
and the public opinion itself, are trained and moulded 
into theoretical and exaggerated views of the real 
affairs of life, by a clique of visionary professors who 
have in reality the formation of the mind of every 
human being susceptible of education, from the child's 
at a day school to the statesman's in the cabinet of 
the sovereign, entirely in their hands. Free trade 
in education is even more necessary than in com- 
mercial or manufacturing affairs, for the stability of 
modern governments and the true liberty of the 
people. What was the cause of the commotions in 
Germany in 1848, but the exaggerated doctrines and 
speculations of the universities spread over, incul- 
cated, indoctrinated into all the educated classes of the 
community ? and what is the cause of the utter failure 
of this movement in 1849, even when it had the 
power, at Frankfort, to establish rational liberty and 
constitutional government throughout Germany, but 
the - false education of the public mind and opinion, 
through the universities, in favour of theories not 
attainable, or, if attainable, of doubtful advantage ? 
The benefit of the collision of opinion against opinion, 
of the views of one great mass of population being 
opposed by those of another mass, and the folly in 
each being neutralised before public opinion is formed 
and fixed, is altogether wanting in Germany ; because 
all opinion is issued, ready made and of the same 
stuff and fashion, from the universities, and all men 
in every station come out clothed in it. Germany 
never can be a free country until education is free. 
A score or two of obscure visionaries at the univer- 



218 FALSE EDUCATION OF THE PUBLIC MIND 

sities will set the public opinion to any tune they 
please. Would science suffer, would knowledge be 
extinguished, and would mankind wander in dark- 
ness if the universities of Berlin, Bonn, Jena, Munich, 
Gottingen, Heidelberg, and a dozen others, were en- 
tirely abolished? It does not appear that England 
is behind Germany in scientific attainments. Philo- 
sophy, legislation, political economy, history, poetry, 
law, mathematics, chemistry, in short all the branches 
of the tree of knowledge, seem tolerably well loaded 
with fruit, every year, in the garden of England. 
But the gardeners are not bred exclusively at Oxford 
or Cambridge ; education is free, is acquired from 
thousands of different sources ; and false views in 
religion, politics, philosophy, social economy, or in 
physical science, are at once detected and exposed by 
those educated in different views and by different 
means ; and the public opinion is not formed on the 
abstract philosophy of any lectures inapplicable to 
present and existing realities, but on a comparison 
and balance of opinions from men educated under 
various circumstances and systems, and from various 
quarurs. In Germany, it must strike every tra- 
veller that the student at Kiel on the Baltic, is in 
mind, opinions on all subjects, in impulses and cha- 
racter, precisely the counterpart of the student at 
Heidelberg on the Neckar, or at Munich or Berlin. 
He is not of his own formation in mind or opinion, but 
of the formation of one peculiar system of opinions 
in religion, social philosophy, and politics, inculcated 
from infancy to manhood at his school and university ; 
and yet that system has no value in practical affairs, 
because it treats of abstract propositions, very true 
in themselves, but very inapplicable to existing in- 



AND OPINION IN THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 219 

terests. The abolition of the universities, that is, of 
the senatus academicus and its separate jurisdiction, 
of the privileges of the students, and the exclusive 
rights of the professors to teach and confer degrees 
or diplomas, the establishment, instead of universities, 
of ambulatory boards of examination totally distinct 
from the business of tuition and strictly examining 
and conferring degrees or diplomas on qualified can- 
didates, without regard to where, when, or how they 
had acquired their knowledge, would, perhaps, be the 
wisest step the German governments could take for 
emancipating themselves from a professorial influence, 
which in effect resembles closely that of the clerical 
influence over all social action in the middle ages. 
It would, in reality, be an emancipation of public 
opinion in Germany. The Germans are eminently a 
loyal people, much more so than the English. They 
have dynastic loyalty, are loyal to the family, to the 
person, to the very faults or vices of their rulers. 
We have no such loyalty, none that would stand the 
test of misgovernment, or even of personal miscon- 
duct. AVe have changed our dynasty, and would do 
so again, for such inroads on constitutional govern- 
ment, established law, religion, and morals, as the 
Continental man submits to, yet retains his unshaken 
attachment to the dynasty he was born under. The 
German sovereigns have thrown away this valuable, 
to them at least valuable, propensity in the German 
character ; and have allowed a class, a sect, to acquire 
a monopoly of the public mind and opinion, and to 
train all the other classes to views very much opposed 
to the stability of their power. If, trusting to the 
natural tendency of the German mind to loyalty, 
peace, and social order, they had left education, re- 



220 THE GERMAN THRONES UNDERMINED 

ligion, and the press entirely free, and had allowed 
the theories, speculations, and follies of literary men 
and philosophers to neutralise each other, the support 
of public opinion in favour of the existing dynasties 
and state principles would have been much more 
powerful and united. The German thrones have been 
undermined by the German universities. A social 
interest and influence independent of, and adverse to, 
the German governments, wielded by the universities 
in one direction, may be considered the great politi- 
cal power in Germany, and that which will ultimately 
triumph over all the existing institutions. 

How is it that with a body of students in Scotland 
so much larger in proportion to the population than 
in Prussia, and in universities on the same arrange- 
ment and educational principle, our government sees 
no plots, conspiracies, or dangerous associations among 
them ? The young men have no doubt their clubs, 
meetings, debating societies, and spout, harangue, and 
rave over their whisky-toddy about the rights of 
man and republican institutions, talk politics, talk 
treason sometimes, and discuss the first principles of 
government and the duty of immolating tyrants on 
the altar of liberty, and would all be Brutuses if they 
could find Csesars, as well as the young lads at the 
German universities. How is it that our government 
finds no danger in all this youthful bluster? and that 
the young men at our universities form no distinct 
corps, no peculiar body dangerous to the state, like 
the German Burschenschaft? It is simply because 
they are not made a distinct corps of, are not con- 
sidered of any importance, and therefore are of none ; 
are obliged to conduct themselves like other people 
under the common law and police of the land, and 



BY THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 221 

are punished for offences by the same laws and tri- 
bunals and in the same way as other people. In 
Germany, the senatus academicus of each university 
has a distinct jurisdiction over the students. They 
are amenable to, and tried and punished only by 
their academical judges who have powers, indepen- 
dent of the ordinary civil courts, to punish them for 
civil or police transgressions, by fine, arrest, impri- 
sonment, for which there is a special academical prison 
in each university, and by rustication or total expul- 
sion. The students live under a different judicature 
even for offences against the public peace, are distinct 
from the ordinary courts of the country, and conse- 
quently they form a distinct body from the rest of 
the people. But the judges in these academical courts, 
the professors, depend for their incomes, or means of 
living, although not entirely, yet very much, on the 
number of students who take out tickets for their 
courses of lectures. They are not individually in a 
position to be over severe in their sentences, or they 
might next session be themselves the parties living 
on bread and water. They might have no hearers 
and no fees. The senatus also naturally consider, 
that if their university got the reputation of being 
very strict and rigorous, the preference would be 
given by students to some other university, in which 
the judicature was more lax ; and the number of 
students, their own profits, and the character of their 
university would be diminished. All this absurd 
arrangement of a police within a police, and a distinct 
body like a military class, but without military dis- 
cipline or an effective judicature to keep it in order, 
falls away in our common-sense arrangement by 
which the student is subject to the same law and 



222 THE GERMAN UNIVERSITY SYSTEM 

tribunal as other young men in the town ; and 
whatever academical punishment the professors may- 
inflict, will certainly be fined or sent to Bridewell for 
any offence or breach of the peace, by the ordinary 
judge, along with the journeymen tailors or shoe- 
makers who may have taken part in the fray. 

Absurd as it may appear on a superficial view, 
that in a population of forty millions of people some 
ten or twelve thousand lads, scattered in seventeen 
universities, should give uneasiness and arouse the 
watchful jealousy of the German sovereigns about 
their opinions, the absurdity vanishes and the great 
importance of this element in the social state of 
Germany appears in its full magnitude, on a nearer 
approach. Out of this body of ten or twelve thousand 
Burschen, living from boyhood to manhood as a 
distinct body from the rest of their fellow-subjects, 
accumulating in numbers yearly, and renewed every 
five or six years by a new swarm, must be replenished 
all the civil functionaries who are to advise the sove- 
reigns, guide the state affairs, administer the law, 
conduct the business of government, and educate the 
succeeding generation in the schools and universities. 
It is the great social evil in Germany, that men are 
called from this ill-educated body — ill-educated for 
all practical social business — to administer laws 
which they never obeyed, or saw the working of on 
the various interests of society, and are called out of 
the narrow prejudiced circle of student life and func- 
tionary life in the universities and bureaux^ to legis- 
late in the cabinets of the German sovereigns, on 
subjects and interests which they never, as private 
men, entered into or understood. They have had no 
opportunity of understanding the business of their 



A KIND OF LAY- JESUITISM. 223 

fellow-citizens, of the Philister, as the student and 
functionary call those who have not been Burschen or 
functionaries ; and they have lived and been bred up, 
not only in ignorance of, and non-intercourse with 
them, but with antagonistic feelings and prejudices 
against them. This is the root of much misgovern- 
ment in Germany. It is in reality a lay Jesuitism. 
"What were the Jesuits ? Men bred up from boyhood 
in a separated exclusive conventual life, ignorant 
consequently of the wants and interests of society 
from which they were professionally cut off, yet in- 
fluencing and governing society in its most important 
interests and objects, by the power which their reli- 
gious connection with princes, courts, and cabinet- 
ministers gave them in all political affairs. German 
functionarism is this Jesuitism minus the religious 
element. The functionary class in Germany, the 
Beamptenstand, are men bred from boyhood to man- 
hood in the schools, universities, and bureaux, with 
a distinct spirit and character, distinct privileges, 
ideas, habits, and modes of living and thinking, from 
the rest of the community ; and with distinct laws, 
judicatures, punishments, rewards, and motives of 
action. They are transplanted from this university 
life, as different from the life of the rest of society as 
if they had been bred up in a Jesuits' college ; and, 
from Burschen they become employes in the inferior 
offices of the state departments, rising by favour or 
merit to functions of more or less importance. They 
are naturally and necessarily imbued with that 
esprit de corps, that class spirit, which regards the 
people as existing rather for the support of function- 
aries, than functionaries for the service of the people. 
They have never lived with the people, or had common 



224 THE CONGRESS OF SOVEREIGNS IN 1819. 

interests or feelings with the mass of the social body, 
whom they are placed over. The heads of depart- 
ments, the cabinet ministers, and the lower officials, 
or expectants in the state bureaux, and in all the 
legislative, administrative, and executive machinery 
of the state, are men formed alike in this conventional 
school in which theory is abundant and actual ac- 
quaintance with the wants of society is necessarily rare 
and imperfect. They have mixed with the rest of the 
community only as students, expectants on office, or as 
officials, not as equals partaking in common interests, 
opinions, and views. They are, to the mass of the 
population of Germany, what the civil and military 
functionaries of the East India Company are to the 
population of Hindostan. 

The congress of sovereigns at Carlsbad in 1819, ap- 
pears to have been assembled solely for the purpose 
of deliberating upon the anomalous position in which 
the sovereigns themselves are placed by this educa- 
tional system in Germany. No other result, at least, 
of that congress ever appeared than a requisition to 
the diet of the German confederation sitting at Frank- 
fort, to appoint a commission of their members, to 
examine and report upon the secret associations and 
political clubs and opinions of the students in the 
German universities. The Commission took three 
years to find matter to report upon. In 1822, their 
report appeared, and beginning with Fichte's address 
to the German people in 1806, and the Tugendbund, 
established by Prince Hardenberg in 1808, for the 
deliverance of Prussia from the French yoke, it went 
through about thirty-two heads of associations, meet- 
ings, writings, all more or less political, mystical, and 
absurd. Teutonia, Arminia, Ehrenspiegel, united Bur 



THE BURSCHENSCHAFT. 225 

schenschaft, are names of some of those pothouse clubs 
which shook the Continental sovereigns from their 
propriety. The indirect influence, however, of this 
body of Bui-schenschaft, and the events of 1848 in 
Germany resulting from that influence, justify the 
vague apprehensions which the sovereigns felt so early 
as 1819, that there was something wrong and danger- 
ous to their power in the educational system of Ger- 
many — something which even their cabinet ministers 
were incompetent to advise them on. The sovereign 
in fact has, under this system, none to choose from, 
even for the highest state offices, but men bred in the 
same principles and views as their predecessors, men 
originally Burschen, afterwards employes. They are 
the only class in the social body from whom the 
sovereign can select qualified servants, no other class 
having the influence, interest, or knowledge necessary ; 
and this class is formed in the same school and all 
with the same political education. He may change 
men, but not measures or principles in his cabinet. 
The political opinions and principles adopted by the 
Burschenschaft are, in this view, of the highest im- 
portance to the governments standing on the principle 
of autocratic rule. The public opinion is formed by 
the Burschenschaft ; the press has no vitality but what 
it receives from this source ; the education of the 
people, from the child at the day-school to the minister 
at the elbow of the monarch, is entirely in the hands 
of men from this university-formation indoctrinated in 
early youth with one code of political opinion by their 
professors. It was evident in 1819, that as the older 
functionaries in every department and rank died out, 
they must be replaced by men bred in the much more 
liberal, or perhaps democratical principles that have 

Q 



226 POLITICAL INFLUENCE OF THE 

since prevailed in Germany. The year 1848 had been 
in preparation since the year 1816. It is a re-action 
against a policy of the German sovereigns too repres- 
sive of the arrangements suitable to, and required 
by the spirit of the age. The Congress of Vienna in 
1815, forgot in the pride of victory that the people 
were a party not to be overlooked in the political 
and social arrangements they were adopting, and the 
sovereigns are now deservedly paying the penalty of 
their ambition, or rather greed. The reckless annex- 
ations and gifts of provinces and populations to Prus- 
sia, Bavaria, Wirtemberg, Baden, without regard to 
the interests or sentiments of the people, tore asunder 
and annihilated in the German mind, the ancient ties 
of affection and loyalty to the sovereign and his 
family, which held together the crazy fabric of the 
German states, and made the people indulgent and 
patient under the vices and misgovernment of their 
rulers. When transferred to other rulers and to new 
sovereigns and laws, the loyalty, affection, and con- 
fidence of the people could not be transferred. A 
spirit of opposition and discontent has been secretly 
glowing under the surface of the settlement of Ger- 
many by the Vienna congress. The restrictions on 
freedom of trade, freedom of the press, freedom of 
conversation, freedom of personal and social action, 
have raised a spirit of innovation, a demand for radical 
reforms, in the social and political state of the German 
people, which cannot be put down. The professors 
educate the functionaries, from the village school- 
master to the prime minister, in one uncontradicted 
code of political views and opinions, and hold the 
trigger by which public opinion may at any moment 
be made to explode. 



GERMAN UNIVERSITIES AND STUDENTS. 227 

The influence and working of this great social 
power is remarkably illustrated by the intrigues of 
the Duke of August enburg for separating the duchy 
of Schleswig from the Danish crown, and annexing 
it to the duchy of Holstein, to which, as a part of 
the German empire, he is next heir. The university 
of Kiel, the professors, students, functionaries, clergy, 
and the provincial newspapers, were all set to work 
to preach a crusade against the Danish language, 
laws, and government, and to raise a fanatical cry 
throughout Germany for the annexation of Schleswig 
to the German duchy of Holstein. The papers of 
the duke fell into the hands of the Danish govern- 
ment, and are published by the keeper of the royal 
archives, Dr. Wegener. They clearly prove one of 
the most foul conspiracies of modern history, to mis- 
lead the public mind by the press and the teachers of 
the youth upon the right to dismember the Danish 
monarchy, and to erect Schleswig and Holstein into 
one duchy for the benefit of this Duke of Augusten- 
burg. Prussia itself, and all the German governments, 
had to follow, not to lead or control, the demoralised 
frenzy of the Burschenschaft, and to engage in a 
bloody and disgraceful war for an unjust and un- 
principled object, at the bidding of a digue of pro- 
fessors, functionaries, newspaper writers, and students, 
influenced, and even bribed and paid, by this noble- 
man to raise a clamour in favour of his pretensions, 
and excite the public mind to demand the annexation 
of Schleswig to Germany, because a portion, about 
one-third of the inhabitants, speak the German lan- 
guage. The professorial influence in Germany was 
more powerful than the governments, and forced 
them to engage in this war with Denmark. 

Q 2 



228 THE LANDWEHK SYSTEM. 



CHAP. XI. 

NOTES ON THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. AN ANCIENT ESTABLISH- 
MENT — REVIVED AFTER THE PEACE OF TILSIT IN 1807 BY 
PRUSSIA — ITS EFFICIENCY PROVED IN 1813, 1814 — ITS PRESENT 
ORGANISATION NOT SUITABLE TO TIMES OF PEACE. OPPRES- 
SIVE AND DEMORALISING EFFECTS OF THE LANDWEHR SERVICE 
ON THE PEOPLE. — LANDWEHR AND A STANDING ARMY COM- 
PARED. EFFECTS OF THE THREE NEW ELEMENTS IN THE SOCIAL 

CONDITION OF THE CONTINENT. THE DISTRIBUTION OF LAND 

FUNCTIONARISM AND LANDWEHR SERVICE CONSIDERED. NOTES 

ON THE PUBLIC BUILDINGS AND FORTIFICATIONS ON THE CON- 
TINENT. ON PENAL LABOUR ON FORTIFICATIONS. ON THE 

ABOLITION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT — WHY IT CANNOT BE 
ABOLISHED IN OUR PENAL CODE. —ON THE WANT OF SELF- 
RESPECT IN THE CONTINENTAL CHARACTER NOTIONS OF LI- 
BERTY. — FORM OF A CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT WITHOUT 
THE REALITY OF FREEDOM. 

The Land wehr system is the third of the new elements 
introduced by the French revolution into the social 
economy of the Continent — one happily unknown to 
us, and inconsistent with our institutions and our 
habits and ideas of individual civil liberty. It de- 
serves to be fully explained, and its effects on the 
condition and character of the Continental people ex- 
amined, at the expense, perhaps, of a tedious repeti- 
tion of previous remarks. It enters so deeply into 
the social state of the German people that, on every 
subject connected with their present social condition 
and economy, allusions or observations regarding it 
are unavoidable. 

The Landwehr system is by no means a modern 
institution, or a new military arrangement dating 



THE ANCIENT LANDWEHR. 229 

from 1813, 1814, when it was renewed and organised 
in its present form by Prussia, and, in imitation of 
Prussia, by all the German sovereigns. It is the 
ancient feudal organisation of the people, which, before 
standing armies in constant pay were introduced, 
existed under the same names of Landwehr, Landsturm, 
or Heerbann, and formed the main military force of 
every country. When the feudal system was in full 
vigour, every crown vassal, with all his immediate 
vassals and all their subvassals, peasants, or serfs, 
among whom were various degrees of servitude — as 
Leibeigen ; horigen, eigene Leute ; zinsbare Liten ; 
Leuden, litones ; in the Latin documents of the middle 
ages called, servi, mancipii, homines proprii, coloni, 
mensuari, glebse adscripti, censuales, servi beneficiarii, 
servi Palatii, villani, &c. &c. ; were all liable to mili- 
tary service, and to be called out in a mass by the 
sovereign : and this general levy was called the Land- 
wehr or Landsturm. The class of free people who 
were not noble were called the wohlgeborne Manner 
of cities, towns, or country districts ; and were liable, 
as well as the nobles, subvassals, and serfs, to this 
military duty. They served on foot, not as nobles 
and knights on horseback ; and on ordinary occasions 
could, by paying a scutagium, or tax, obtain an ex- 
emption from this military attendance. Every knight 
was bound to appear on the field with two squires, 
two servants, and nine horses, as his personal equip- 
ment. This was called a glaiva, glaijie, or gleve, and 
appears to have been reckoned at five fighting men per 
glaiva. In 1431, the Emperor Sigismund fixed the 
quota to be furnished to his army in the Netherlands, 
by the provinces of Holland and Zealand, at 200 
glaives, being 1000 mounted men. The infantry, 



230 THE ANCIENT LANDWEHR 

about the same period, viz. in 1475, and in the same 
country, were reckoned by spears. Each spear con- 
sisted of the spearman, a squire, a weapon-bearer, and 
eight heavy-armed men on foot. From these spears, 
probably, came the spontoons and halberds, used until 
a late period in our standing armies to distinguish 
officers and Serjeants in command of similar small 
divisions of troops. This old arrangement was social 
as well as military. Each glaiva, or spear, was com- 
posed of the people on the land paying the military 
service due for it to their feudal lord or superior. 
They were connected with the leader as tenants or 
serfs, and landlord or feudal master and owner, as 
well as by the military connection of soldiers and offi- 
cer. The discipline, drill, and use of such weapons 
as troops were armed with before the introduction of 
fire-arms in warfare, and the simple field -movements 
required in battles which only commenced when men 
came hand to hand in combat, might perhaps be 
acquired better in the small divisions of this Landwehr 
force, living together on the land under their own 
spearman, or knight, and exercised at their wapen- 
takes, than if they had been congregated in larger 
bodies. The use of fire-arms necessarily introduced 
standing armies. In the thirteenth century, money, 
scutagia, began to be taken instead of personal service. 
Towns and villages, as well as individuals, began to 
purchase their exemption from the Landwehr ; and 
Sondinieren, Sondinaren, Soldners, soldiers, or men 
receiving sold, or pay, were generally hired ; and at 
first only for a campaign or a short period. The 
Landwehr men whom they replaced as substitutes, 
were only liable to service for forty days in the field. 
Charles VII. of France, after he had cleared his do- 



REPLACED BY STANDING ARMIES. 231 

minions of the English, was the first sovereign who 
kept up what could be called a standing army. He 
had 9000 horsemen, and 16,000 foot soldiers, always in 
pay. Body-guards, guards of castles, and warders of 
city gates, are mentioned in the older chronicles ; but 
these could scarcely be called a standing army of the 
state, being troops in the pay of the different barons 
or city municipalities, who engaged them. In 1475, 
Charles the Bold had 2200 spears in his pay, which 
would be a body of about 24,000 men. They were 
called Lansquenets, or Lanceknechts ; that is, attend- 
ants on the spear, or lance, to which they belonged. 
He had besides, 4000 Schutzen (shooters) three 
fourths of whom were mounted, 600 musketeers, and 
600 artillerymen. The distinction between the Schut- 
zen and the musketeers is not very clear ; or whether 
the Schutzen were bowmen, and the musketeers men 
with fire-arms ; or whether the mounted Schutzen 
were men with the heavy fire-arms, springals, blun- 
derbusses, &c, which required a prop in firing them 
and horses to transport them ; and the others were 
armed with the ordinary matchlock muskets. The 
use of fire-arms necessarily produced a general com- 
mutation of the feudal Landwehr service into a tax, a 
scutagium. The hired soldier, bred to the manipu- 
lations and movements which the new weapon re- 
quired, superseded the peasant taken from his plough, 
or the baron from his hounds and hawks, for a few 
weeks' service, with sword, spear, and bow. The 
change was in every way beneficial to society. It 
emancipated the body of the people from a heavy, 
oppressive, and demoralising burden of military ser- 
vice, and gave the state a more effective army. It 
settled also the relative strength of sovereigns, put 

Q 4 



232 SOCIAL ADVANTAGES OF A 

an end to small wars of petty barons or princes, and 
prevented for ever the anarchy of the middle ages, 
when every little state ravaged the territories of its 
neighbour. The number of battalions in a regular 
standing army became the measure of the power and 
importance of a country, and that number was limited 
by the financial means of each country to pay them. 
It was a manifest advance in the social economy of 
Europe, that the capability of paying taxes, a capa- 
bility which is the result of industry, security of 
property, and good government, came to be the sole 
measure of the strength of a country, either for de- 
fence or attack, instead of the brute force of a multi- 
tude congregated suddenly with rude and cheap 
weapons and imperfect discipline, for landwehr ser- 
vice. The standing armies also of the Continent, not 
being exposed to unwholesome climates or duties, are 
when once separated from the main stock of the popu- 
lation, renewed by a very small percentage of the 
original force being added yearly to keep up their 
numbers. In a standing army of 100,000 men, the 
loss by death, in time of peace, will not exceed the 
mortality among an equal number of common la- 
bourers. Should the yearly deficiency in any one 
year of war amount even to 20 per cent., still to 
replace that number of 20,000 men by ballot or re- 
cruitment, or even conscription, is a far less heavy 
evil to society than the disturbing of all industry 
and domestic arrangements by calling out all men, 
whatever be their social position and duties, for 
military service in a Landwehr. It is a retrograde 
step, not an advance, to recur, in our state of civilisa- 
tion and in ordinary peaceful times, to the military 
organisation of the people of the middle ages. In 



STANDING AEMY ABOVE LANDWEHR FORCE. 233 

every modern community there will be found four or 
five individuals in every hundred of the generation 
able to bear arms, who, from temperament, social 
position, habits, and turn of mind, seem born to be 
soldiers — are unfit for any occupation or way of 
living in the useful arts, and are well adapted for 
military service. From this class substitutes, much 
more suitable than their principals for military service, 
can always be obtained at a fair bounty; and for 
society almost any bounty should be preferred, even 
should it be paid by the state, to breaking up the 
industrial enterprise of the class of employers, and 
the steady, regular, working-habits of the employed, 
by making them all indiscriminately serve for a term 
of years in the army. 

The standing armies of the Continental powers fell 
into disrepute during the French wars of the revo- 
lution. An outrageous discipline, inhuman severity 
of punishment, and a ludicrous importance given to 
trifling observances in buttons, buckles, pigtails, hair- 
powder, and pipeclay, distinguished particularly 
the Prussian service, which, after the Seven Years' 
War, and up to the year 1794, was held to be the 
model of perfection in all military affairs. The cane 
of the serjeant and corporal never rested, and the 
barbarous discipline in trifles brutified the common 
soldier and stultified his commanders. The mind of 
the superior officer was formed upon an unceasing 
attention to the brightness of belts and buckles, the 
uniformity of the length and tie of the soldier's queue, 
and the machine-like precision of his drill and parade 
movements. The higher officers of the European 
armies, the princes and commanders by hereditary 
right of the forces of their own countries, repaired to 



234 DEFEAT OF THE PRUSSIAN STANDING ARMY, 

Potsdam, to study Prussian military regulations and 
discipline, and, on their return, introduced them into 
the armies they were born to command, with addi- 
tional severity. An extreme attention to trifling ob- 
servances in dress and drill constituted the military 
education in this school; and a great proportion of 
the superior officers of the Continental armies who 
had been formed in it, were in mind and military 
capacity merely drill-serjeants in a higher rank. The 
signal defeats of the German armies, and of our own 
troops also, in the first campaigns against the armies 
of the French republic, proved the want of true 
military qualifications for high command in the offi- 
cers bred in this martinet school. It was brought to 
the test in the war between Prussia and France, 
which began in the end of September, 1806 ; and by 
the battles of Auerstadt and. Jena, on the 13th and 
14th of October, ended in the total defeat, dispersion, 
or submission of the highly drilled Prussian army, 
which, since the Seven Years' War, had been the model 
of all the other European armies. The failure was 
signal, almost ludicrous, from its completeness and 
rapidity. In little more than four weeks from the 
advance of the Prussian army to Dresden (21st Sep- 
tember, 1806), it was defeated, dispersed — Bonaparte 
was in Berlin on the 27th October, his troops on the 
Yistula, and every important fortress in the kingdom 
had been surrendered, and generally without a mili- 
tary necessity or an honourable defence. Such were 
the results of a single campaign of six weeks, between 
a model army of parade perfection, an army of military 
human machines, in which the soldier's mind, spirit, 
or morale was annihilated by a system of brutal 
discipline enforcing childish observances by inhuman 



OWING TO ITS BRUTAL DISCIPLINE. 235 

punishments, and an army in which, with a discipline 
of life or death on essential points of duty, the trifling 
observances of the Prussian martinet school were re- 
garded as trifles, were not enforced by the cane or 
lash, and in which the feelings of self-respect of the 
common soldier were attended to and cherished. 

By the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, Prussia was reduced 
to the rank of a second-rate power. She lost terri- 
tories containing a population of four millions eight 
hundred thousand inhabitants, with a corresponding 
proportion of her former revenues. Her army was 
reduced from a nominal strength of 239,000 men in 
1806, to a nominal strength of 30,000 in 1807. Her 
remaining territories were cut up by a free right of 
way for Saxon and French troops, on three different 
military roads, across Prussia to their possessions of 
Warsaw and the city of Dantzig ; and the passage of 
troops to change the garrisons and renew the military 
stores in those districts, ceded by the Peace of Tilsit 
to Saxony and France, was a perpetual military sur- 
veillance and check on every movement of Prussia. 
The jealousy of France would have prevented any 
augmentation of the Prussian army, even if the finan- 
cial state of Prussia had not prevented it as effectually. 
The prestige, too, in favour of a highly drilled standing 
army was gone, was beaten out of favour with all men, 
by the defeats it had suffered from armies of raw 
conscripts. The re-action of opinion went perhaps 
too far, and a standing army, as a military means, was 
undervalued as much as it had been overvalued before 
the wars of the revolution. Its social advantage over 
a Landwehr force was not thought of then, and is 
seldom considered by social economists now. The 
renewal of the old German Landwehr system was a 



236 REVIVAL OF THE LANDWEHR IN 1813. 

political necessity in the situation of Prussia im- 
poverished and watched over by France. It was a 
master-stroke of policy to renew it, and the renewal 
was carried into effect without giving umbrage, cre- 
ating jealousy, or even attracting notice. By a royal 
edict of 9th October, 1807, it was declared that pea- 
sants and burgesses were entitled to purchase land, 
which before could be held only by nobles. There 
were small peasant properties held under many feudal 
duties and even degrading servitudes to the lord of 
the barony, which were the only lands persons not 
noble-born could acquire. All the feudal restrictions 
on the free use of land by the purchasers, all personal 
services, as leibeigen peasants or serfs, were abolished 
from the year 1810 by this edict. It abolished those 
privileges of the nobles, which extended to exemption 
from taxes, from military service, and other duties, 
and it placed them, in their relations to the state, on 
the same footing as other classes of Prussian subjects. 
The hereditary jurisdictions, however, of the nobles, 
and the payments of such feudal services for land as 
were not personal, but fixed rents in labour, were 
considered to be patrimonial and pecuniary interests, 
and were not touched by this edict. This first step 
was taken in the ministry of Stein, who in the follow- 
ing year was dismissed to appease the jealousy of the 
French government. He was succeeded by Alten stein, 
who made no advance in the path opened up by Stein ; 
but Hardenberg was appointed minister in 1810, and 
he abolished many of the remaining privileges and 
exemptions, both of the nobility and of corporations, 
and relieved the peasantry of the feudal burdens on 
their land at fixed rates settled by commissioners, and 
abolished the duty of providing horses and provender 



ITS EFFICIENCY AS A MILITARY FORCE. 237 

for the nobles and functionaries travelling on the 
public service, without any remuneration, as pre- 
viously was the case. The sale also, in small lots, of 
the state domains and of many estates of nobles im- 
poverished by the expenses of modern life, created a 
body of independent peasant proprietors, who now 
had rights and interests to defend. It was not until 
March, 1813, that these steps had prepared the people 
for the organisation of a general Landwehr force, in 
which all males above seventeen years of age and able 
to carry arms, were called on to serve. The war 
against France was already declared. It was a time 
of general excitement and enthusiasm. The French 
army was on its disorderly retreat from Moscow. The 
German people saw the humiliation of its oppressors, 
and they were suffering from the vindictiveness of the 
proud army on its flight. No law or conscription was 
necessary to rouse them to arms. The Landwehr 
fully justified, at this crisis, the reliance of the Prus- 
sian government. It raised the Prussian army of about 
40,000 troops of the line, to a numerical strength of 
200,000 men at the opening of the campaign. In 
every military operation and conflict, at the battle of 
the Katzbach, at the battle of Leipsic, at the numerous 
battles previous to the occupation of Paris by the 
allied powers in March, 1814, the Landwehr proved 
its efficiency as a military force. But in estimating 
its military value compared to a standing army, or 
what is called troops of the line, it must be remem- 
bered that in this campaign, and in all the military 
operations between the retreat of the French army 
from Russia and the battle of Waterloo, it was Land- 
wehr against Landwehr. The French troops were 
but a Landwehr composed of raw conscripts, with as 



238 LANDWEHR AND A STANDING ARMY 

small, or probably a smaller proportion of old regular 
soldiers among them than the Prussian army. The 
skeletons only, and scarcely the skeletons of the French 
regiments of the line escaped from Moscow ; and the 
veterans who survived the disastrous retreat, were 
not fit for the immediate service that followed close 
upon it. What remained of the formed and seasoned 
troops of the- line of the old French army, were in 
Spain. The French Landwehr men, or conscripts, 
were physically inferior to the Prussian Landwehr 
men, as the adult population in France had been 
exhausted and anticipated by preceding conscriptions 
for the Russian and Spanish campaigns, and the ranks 
were filled with lads who had not arrived at the strength 
and endurance requisite for military service. They 
were morally inferior also. The whole German popu- 
lation between seventeen and sixty years of age, 
armed and united for rescuing their different districts 
of the common country from the oppression and ex- 
actions of a foreign invader, which all had felt, were 
fighting under an excitement and enthusiasm to which 
their opponents were strangers. The mass of the 
French conscripts were in the field by compulsion, 
and had not been embodied long enough to acquire 
that discipline and those feelings of attachment to 
their regiment, their officers, and comrades, and that 
esprit de corps which carry on the soldiers of a 
standing army. It can scarcely be concluded, from 
the military events of 1813 and 1814, that a Landwehr 
force is, in ordinary circumstances of warfare, equal 
to a standing army. It was under extraordinary 
circumstances, such as Europe had not witnessed since 
the Crusades, in a war in which the enthusiasm of the 
people was the great element and moving power, and 



COMPARED AS A MILITARY FORCE. 239 

which the governments had only to organise, guide, 
and lead to battle, that the Landwehr system arose, 
was tried, and fully succeeded. If it be as effective 
and useful a military force in ordinary times, and as 
well adapted to the well-being of civilised people in 
its military and social effects and tendencies, as a 
standing army of men having no profession or pro- 
spects but those of a military life, may well be doubted. 
The Landwehr system as now existing in Prussia, 
and followed with slight differences of details, by all 
the other German governments, is this : — 

The Prussian army consists of regiments of the 
line, or standing troops. This is considered the for- 
mation-school of the military force or army of the 
whole population of the country. Every male, with- 
out exception, in the whole population is bound to 
serve three years, between his twentieth and his 
twenty-fifth years, as a private in the ranks of a 
regiment of the line. The only exceptions are cases 
of bodily infirmity, and the clergy, schoolmasters, 
only sons of widows, and a few others ; and the lia- 
bility to serve is rather suspended than altogether 
abandoned by government in those exceptions. Pro- 
perty, rank, occupation, business, give no claim to 
exemption, and no substitutes or remplacents are 
accepted of, as in the French conscription system. 
Every man must serve as a private in the ranks of a 
regiment of the line, whatever be his social position. 
The only allowance made is, that young men of pro- 
perty or of the higher classes and professions, who 
provide their own clothing, arms, and equipment at 
their own expense, may be permitted to serve in 
certain rifle or chasseur corps for one year only, 
instead of three, on a petition with sufficient reasons 



240 ORGANISATION OF THE LANDWEHR. 

given for the indulgence required. After the three 
years' service in the line, the young man is turned 
over to his district Landwehr regiment of the ersten 
Aufgeboth, or, as we would call it, first for service. 
This division of the Landwehr force is considered the 
proper army ; the troops of the line being its forma- 
tion-school. It is liable, like the standing army, to 
serve in or out of the country ; but in time of peace 
to save expense it is only embodied for manoeuvre and 
exercise for a few weeks yearly. Its staff only is in 
constant pay. The division of the second Aufgeboth, 
or second for service, consists of all who have served 
their three years in the line, and their two years in 
the Landwehr of the first Aufgeboth, and are under 
forty years of age. These are considered trained 
soldiers, and men settled in occupations, and are 
therefore, in time of peace, only assembled in small 
divisions, and in their own localities, for a few days' 
exercise. The Landsturm consists of all not in the 
the service, or discharged from it by the completion 
of their terms of service in the other divisions ; and it 
is mustered and organised as well as the other divi- 
sions of the Landwehr force. The principle of the 
system is, that every Prussian subject, without excep- 
tion, shall pass through a military training of three 
years, in the ranks of a regiment of the line, and shall 
then be available during his whole life as a trained sol- 
dier, in one or other of the divisions of the Landwehr 
force, according to his age and fitness for any military 
duty. A whole nation, with scarcely the exception of 
a single able-bodied man, and without exemption of 
class or station, passing through a military training 
of three years in the ranks of regiments of the line, 
and then formed into regiments from which, when 



THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. 241 

engaged in civil occupations, the men are only as it 
were on furlough, or like soldiers in cantonments, 
and are called together, mustered, and exercised for 
several weeks in field manoeuvres, gives an imposing 
impression of this military force. The perfection also 
of all the arrangements of this vast and complicated 
system, and the general fairness, impartiality, and 
economy with which it is worked, must raise the 
admiration of every traveller who inquires about the 
Landwehr. But is it a good military system ? Is it 
a good social system ? 

The military and social results are so blended 
together that they cannot be separately considered. 
The whole nation is an army ; the army is not merely 
a class in the nation, more or less numerous accord- 
ing to the financial resources and political position of 
the state. The first observation that will occur to 
the social economist, on the slightest consideration of 
the Landwehr system, is that the system counteracts 
its own object. Here is an immense army on paper ; 
but the means to move this immense army is in an 
inverse ratio to its numbers. The means of the 
state to bring this vast body of trained soldiers, or 
any considerable portion of them, into the field in 
actual warfare, are the financial resources of the 
country; money being the sinews of war. But the 
financial resources of every country depend upon the 
productive industry of the people, out of which alone 
taxes to the state proceed ; and if the productive in- 
dustry of the people be diminished by three years of 
their time and labour being taken up in military ser- 
vice, by so much is the means of the state to move 
this vast force in military operations diminished. 
The productive as well as the military time of life of 

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242 SOCIAL AND MILITARY DEFECTS 

the industrious man begins about twenty, and ends 
about fifty years of age. These thirty years are 
his capital stock; and whatever he contributes, di- 
rectly or indirectly, to the finances of the state, 
must be earned within these thirty years, by the 
application of his time and labour to some kind of 
productive industry. If one-tenth of this time be 
taken from him, and consumed in military services, 
he is so much poorer, and the state is so much poorer. 
The indirect loss to both is probably as great as the 
direct loss ; for a man cannot turn at once from the 
habits of military life to the habits of steady indus- 
try, and to the sedentary occupations of civil life. If 
he has gone through an apprenticeship, and learned 
a trade, before beginning his three years' service in a 
regiment, he must almost have to learn it over again 
after three years' disuse of his working tools and 
working habits. He can never become an expert 
quick workman in any handicraft. But besides his 
three years of continuous service at the age most 
important to form the habits of a working man, his 
time is broken in upon and his habits deranged every 
year by his military service of six or eight weeks 
in his Landwehr regiment. One- sixth probably of 
his working year is consumed before he can return to 
his working habits. All this is a dead loss to the 
state, as well as to the individual. It diminishes the 
capability of the aggregate body of individuals — the 
nation — to furnish the taxes necessary to move the 
numbers embodied and kept up as a Landwehr, in any 
military operation. If every war were, like that of 
1813 — 15 ? a war to shake off the oppression of a 
foreign invader, in which every interest and feeling 
was roused to a mighty and enthusiastic effort to 



OF THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. 243 

drive the oppressors across the Rhine, and in which 
English subsidies furnished to Prussia and the Con- 
tinental powers the financial means for military ope- 
rations, the Landwehr system might be the best 
and most suitable ; but it appears a mistaken policy 
to continue in time of peace a military organisation 
of the whole people, adapted only to the extreme and 
rarely occurring case of a struggle on the native soil, 
with the aid of foreign financial means, for property 
and all that men hold dear, and to establish it as the 
ordinary state of the whole population in time of 
peace and when the exigence is past in which it 
arose. 

The Landwehr system is probably a great mistake 
in military as well as social policy. Three years' con- 
tinuous service in the ranks of a regiment may, no 
doubt, be quite sufficient to form the soldier in all 
that regards drill, manoeuvre, appearance, and what 
may be called the bodily or physical attainments ; but 
what is of more importance, the morale of the soldier, 
his habits, mind, character, if formed, cannot be kept 
up in civil life after his three years of service expire. 
He may go through all his military exercises and 
duties of his new Landwehr regiment, during the six 
weeks it is embodied, as well as ever ; but the soul and 
spirit of military life, the tie between soldier and 
officer, the knowledge of and confidence in each other, 
the tie of comradeship between soldier and soldier, the 
ties of attachment to the corps, its character, its 
honour, its colours, cannot be formed, or kept up if 
formed, by six weeks' parade and review exercise. 
The regiments of the line even, by their connexion 
with the Landwehr as its fori nation school, must be 
composed of a shifting soldiery, three-fourths of them 

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244 SOCIAL AND MILITARY DEFECTS 

either recruits in their first or second year's service, 
or men about leaving the regiment for ever, and re- 
turning, at the end of their three years of service, to 
their homes and civil occupations. The officers in 
such a military body become a distinct class, having 
no interest in the men of whom they lose sight after 
three years' service ; and their regard and partiality 
naturally fall on the enlisted soldiers of their regi- 
ments, who are always under their command. This 
disjunction of officers and men into two distinct classes, 
without accordance or union of feeling between them, 
appears in some of the transactions at Berlin in the 
memorable spring of 1848. One instance, having no 
immediate connexion with the political agitation of 
the period, shows the unavoidable discordance between 
the class of officers and the class of privates, in regi- 
ments in which the ranks are filled indiscriminately 
from all classes of the social body. In the German 
language inferiors, such as servants, common la- 
bourers, and common soldiers, are always addressed 
by the higher classes, such as nobles, officers, men of 
rank, in the third person singular, Er. Equals are 
addressed in the third person plural, Sie. We use the 
second person plural, you to all ranks, and have no 
such distinctions in our language. Er (he), in 
speaking to a person, denotes a certain difference, a 
contempt or abasement, implying the superiority of 
the speaker over the person spoken to. It had long 
been a cause of irritation between the Landwehr man 
in the ranks, and the class of officers, that he was 
addressed with this contemptuous Er, although in 
birth, education, and social position in private life, he 
often stood far above the person thus addressing him. 
The discordant feeling between the Landwehr men 



OF THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. 245 

and the officers arising from this little circumstance 
in the usage of language, can only be understood by 
those who know how liable to take offence the German 
of the upper class is at any infringement of the 
respect due to him, and how much indignity may be 
conveyed by using the third person singular instead 
of the third plural in the German language. It was 
during the commotions in Berlin in 1848, that it was 
found necessary to conciliate the Landwehr by re- 
moving this offensive form of address, and by royal 
edict to order all officers to use the form of Sie in 
speaking to the privates. In such a military body as 
the Landwehr, with all the people of social importance, 
property, education, and respectability in the ranks, 
and the officers, and non-commissioned officers espe- 
cially, inferior in all those respects to the men they 
command, the subordination, — the prompt, willing, 
blind obedience to inferior officers, which is the 
cement that holds together the units of a military 
force, — cannot be relied on. It is not in human nature 
that the man of fortune, social importance, education, 
the professional man, the merchant, the manufacturer, 
the tradesman, should look up to as his superior, and 
implicitly obey, both on parade and in barracks, his 
corporal, or Serjeant, who may have been his own 
menial servant, journeyman, or labourer ; and who, 
although a good drill officer, may be an indifferent 
member of civil society. The autocratic government 
may place men of such incongruous stations and 
culture in a row, and call them an army, or materials 
for an army, officers and men, but cannot amalgamate 
them into an efficient body for ordinary warfare.* A 
war of enthusiasm, indeed, such as that of 1813 — 14, 
may fuse such discordant materials into one mass so 

B 3 



246 SOCIAL AND MILITARY DEFECTS 

long as the heat is kept up. But wars of enthusiasm 
are among the rarest in history — not half a dozen in 
Europe since the first crusade. It is discipline, stern 
discipline, that is alone worth any thing when en- 
thusiasm is wanting; and in the constitution of a 
Landwehr force the basis on which to build up a true 
military discipline is wanting. In 1816 the military en- 
thusiasm of the people had evaporated with its cause. 
Europe was liberated from French oppression, and in 
peace. France was bridled by the army of occupation. 
Every country was engaged in the peaceful arrange- 
ment of the territories added to it or left to it by the 
Vienna Congress of 1815; and people began to turn 
to the realities of civil life, and to look with contempt 
on the pomp and circumstance of war, in the midst 
of profound peace. The continuance of the Land- 
wehr system, and the fixing it as a perpetual esta- 
blishment, became so unpopular, that in August 1817, 
the Landwehr-men in Silesia refused to be sworn in 
for service. In the Rhine provinces they would only 
serve in regiments fixed in their own locality. The 
government of Prussia appears to have been at this 
time military mad. It had a standing army of 
100,000 men, of which a part, 9 regiments of infantry 
and 8 regiments of cavalry, were maintained by France, 
being part of the army of occupation that, by the 
Peace of Paris, was to remain in, and be supported by 
France for five years. The rest of this standing army 
was in Prussia, and was by far too large for the 
financial means of the country ; yet 76 regiments of 
Landwehr were ordered to be organised and called 
out, in order to manoeuvre with the troops of the line, 
and establish the system in peace or war. A feud 
arose and still exists between the troops of the line 



OF THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. 247 

and the Landwehr. The former despise the peasants, 
artisans, and people of all classes, called out to play 
at soldiers with them in summer encampments for a 
few weeks ; the latter speak of the battles of Denni- 
witz, Gross-Beeren, the Katsbach. Waterloo, as gained 
by the Landwehr alone, not by the troops of the line. 
The discord, also, between the noble and not noble, 
or burgeriiche officers, prevails in every regiment. 
None but the noble born could be officers in the old 
Prussian service. At the conclusion of the Seven 
Years' War, Frederick the Great dismissed every officer 
who could not prove his nobility by birth, whatever 
his claims were from merit or length of service. In 
the struggle for Prussian independence in 1813, the 
government found it necessary to declare that merit 
should be promoted without regard to birth, but even 
this concession was limited to the existing war. Many 
burgeriiche, or not noble, fought their way to the 
rank of officers, but still the spirit of the government 
is against them, while the spirit of the people attri- 
buted all the merit of every action to the burgeriiche 
officers. The number of officers who have risen from 
the ranks since the peace, is incomparably less than 
in our own service. The not noble are not indeed 
expressly excluded as in the old service, but the 
requirements of education at military academies, and 
examinations in sciences or acquirements which none 
but the sons of the upper classes, or of the needy 
nobility educated at the expense of government, can 
have any opportunity of attaining, exclude the common 
soldier from the rank of officer in Prussia as effectually 
as the requirement of nobility. It is this want of 
good faith in its measures that makes the Prussian 
government distrusted and unpopular. It is reckoned 

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248 SOCIAL AND MILITARY DEFECTS 

that about one in twenty of the officers of infantry are 
burgerliche, but although not noble, they are sons of 
the middle class of citizens of property, who have 
given them a military education ; the cavalry officers 
are almost all nobles ; the artillery, and engineers, and 
all the corps in which science is required, are officered 
principally by burgerliche, but few or none have been 
common soldiers originally raised from the ranks, in 
any branch of the service. The noble-born officers 
look down upon the burgerliche officers, who return 
this disdain with hatred ; and the same feeling exists 
still more strongly between the troops of the line and 
the Landwehr. This discordance in the army itself, 
between the aristocratic and the autocratic elements 
composing it, will account for many apparent incon- 
sistencies in the action both of the government and 
of the people and troops, in the events of 1848 and 
1849. It may be reasonably doubted whether the 
advantage of drill and military organisation given to 
the whole population by the Landwehr system, be 
not greatly overbalanced by the loss of the time and 
labour of the industrial productive classes, on which 
alone national wealth and the financial means of the 
country are founded — by the disgust at military 
service naturally produced by that loss, and the de- 
ficiency of enthusiasm when it is wanted, by this 
perpetual recurrence of sham warfare at reviews. All 
the drill and discipline gained by the Landwehr 
system were given in France as effectually in three 
months, or even less time, when it was necessary to 
call out the people to defend the country in 1794, and 
again in 1814, against foreign invaders. In modern 
warfare, the preparations for invading a country are 
so extensive, complicated, and slow, that six months 



OF THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. 249 

before an army can march, the world knows what to 
prepare against, and where to be prepared. 

The demoralisation of the youth of a nation by 
three years' service in the ranks of a regiment of the 
line, is one of the greatest evils of the system. Sol- 
diers are not necessarily immoral men, but the en- 
listed soldier engaged for life, or for a long term of 
years, is generally a man whose character and con- 
duct have ejected him from the ordinary occupations 
of civil life. His habits of industry and of steady 
application to the usual business of the middle or the 
lower classes, are gone. He is demoralised in all 
that makes the useful, quiet, respectable citizen. He 
is, too often, a man given to debauchery and excess, 
when it does not interfere with his military duty ; 
and if he is a clean, smart, well drilled soldier, he is 
looked up to by his comrades, and, perhaps, the more 
when, with these professional accomplishments, he 
sets at defiance the principles and decencies of civil 
life in his conduct and conversation. Think of a 
father and mother, in some country village, who have 
brought up a son in moral and religious habits, in in- 
nocence of evil, and in ideas suitable to their station 
and to the humble trade he is to live by, being com- 
pelled to send him for three years, at his outset in 
life, to join a regiment of the line in a large, dissi- 
pated city like Berlin or Cologne, and to associate 
with such companions. The moral tyranny of the 
system exceeds what was ever exercised before by 
any European government, and may well excuse the 
discontent of the Prussian subjects. To eradicate 
the sentiment of independence and self-action in the 
whole population, to keep them always in a semi- 
military dependence on civil and military function- 



250 SOCIAL AND MOEAL DEFECTS 

aries, as a security to the crown, has evidently been 
the policy proposed to themselves by the German 
governments in their civil and military establishments 
of functionarism and Landwehr. They have overshot 
the mark. In modern times, it is not merely against 
foreign aggression that governments, in which the 
people have no voice or part, must be prepared. The 
enemy is at home, is the people themselves who, 
living without self-government, social duty, or free 
action, although educated and acquainted with the 
civil and political rights enjoyed by the people of 
other countries, are more ready to follow the hot- 
headed enthusiasts who appeal to their grievances 
and feelings, than to listen to their autocratic rulers 
and functionaries with whom they have no sym- 
pathy. These governments have armed and dis- 
ciplined the people, have made them equal to the 
troops of the line in military disregard of bloodshed 
and tumult, and in the confidence and the means of 
success in civil war. They have not been trained to 
regard peace, order, and security, as interests con- 
fided to them and in their keeping. The baton of the 
civil constable is the emblem of the social condition 
and civilisation of the English people. On the Con- 
tinent, it is the loaded field-piece, pointed down the 
streets. By the military training of the people, 
without giving them civil liberty and political rights, 
the autocratic governments have disarmed themselves, 
have lost the preponderance and prestige of an irre- 
sistible standing army at their command at all times, 
which was essential to their existence. The Land- 
wehr system, it was boasted, makes the whole nation 
an army. True. But where is the army that can 
keep down this army when just complaints of grievous 



OF THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. 251 

misgovernment, or the enthusiasm for false objects, 
to which the German mind is prone, rouse this mili- 
tary mass against their autocratic rulers? It is for- 
tunate for the liberty and civilisation of Europe, that 
the attempt to turn the whole population of a country 
into an army, has proved abortive. Military organ- 
isation extended beyond a class in the community, 
carried over the whole population, and making social 
and civil duties of secondary importance to military 
service for the support of governments, has ended, 
as it deserved to end, in making them dangerous 
subjects, without making them good soldiers. The 
people trained to be an army, are a people with 
wrongs to redress, and in a position of disciplined 
armed antagonism to their autocratic governments. 
The Landwehr system was in reality a backward step 
both in policy and in civilisation, replacing society 
in the nineteenth century on the ground on which it 
had stood in the middle ages. It is for the common 
man a return to the leibeigen state. He was not 
more adscriptus glebce in the thirteenth or fourteenth 
century, under his feudal baron or superior, than he 
is in the nineteenth, by the Landwehr system, under 
his civil and military superiors. His time and labour 
are taken from him, his trade or means of living 
broken up by military service, not, as in the feudal 
ages, for a service of forty days, but for three years 
together, and for forty days or more every year after- 
wards, and with the vexatious consideration, that his 
time and labour are taken from him to be expended 
in useless parades, reviews, and sham battles, in time 
of profound peace. And for this end, he cannot go 
on his own affairs from place to place, he cannot be 
absent, however urgent his business, from his musters 



252 SOCIAL EVIL OF LANDWEHE SERVICE. 

and drills, in his Landwehr regiment, without leave 
and passport, and his return made sure to his mili- 
tary and civil superintendents, or he is liable to 
punishment as a deserter. In the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries, when feudal serfage was in most 
vigour, the serf could at least bargain with his lord, 
as he can now in Russia, for his exemption from per- 
sonal service for a time or for perpetuity. In France, 
he can provide a substitute for his military service, if 
he is drawn as a conscript. But in Germany, the 
state functionary is his feudal lord, yet without the 
power to exempt the serf from his military servitude. 
The common man cannot remove in search of work, 
or on his private affairs, from the locality in which 
he is enrolled without examinations, certificates, pass- 
ports, and a transfer of his military service still due, 
to the regiment of his new locality. He is subject to 
the will and caprice of the civil and military officials 
who have the charge of such business in the Landwehr 
system, and who have no interest but to save them- 
selves trouble, and may grant or refuse him the 
liberty of removing even to the next village. He 
is literally adscriptus glebce, written down in the 
muster roll as belonging to the soil, and enjoys less 
freedom of action, less civil right, and less self- 
government, than the man of the feudal ages. It is 
not surprising that an educated people like the Ger- 
mans, should have made a simultaneous movement 
in 1848, to throw off such oppressive misgovernment, 
and this system of functionary and military rule, so 
unsuitable to the present state of society. It is only 
surprising that people and even journalists can be 
found among us, who ascribe the convulsions and 
tumults which are tearing Germany asunder, to con- 



ARGUMENT FOR THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM. 253 

spiracies of socialists, communists, red republicans, 
and such political bugbears, instead of to the true 
and obvious cause, the oppression of the people by 
the Landwehr and functionary system, and the inter- 
ference with the industry, free action, and civil rights 
of the individual in a way unknown in other civilised 
countries, and altogether unsuitable to the spirit of 
the age. The Landwehr system is the incubus on 
the prosperity, liberty, and morality of the German 
people. 

The main argument for the continuance of the 
Landwehr system is, that Germany, with France on 
one side and Russia on the other, each having an 
army of half a million of men, is a barrier between 
the two, preventing the conquest by either of them 
of all civilised Europe. But such vague and remote 
political apprehensions of the barely possible in Eu- 
ropean affairs, do not justify the actual sacrifice of 
the present well-being of the German people, espe- 
cially as the very well-being, industry, and prosperity 
of Germany, sacrificed to this apprehension of the 
politician, would promote the object of the Landwehr 
system, — the defence of the country — much more 
effectually by providing what is quite as necessary 
as soldiers in warfare, — the financial means to move 
them. If every generation had its Napoleon, and its 
English ministry ready to subsidise the German powers 
with forty-eight millions sterling, to move their Land- 
wehr armies, it would still be an unwise policy to 
the whole population a standing army at the expense 
make of the productive industry of the country, 
which should, in time of peace, be creating the means 
to support the financial burdens of war. Germany 
will have to fight her next war of independence at 



254 ARGUMENT FOR THE LANDWEHR SYSTEM 

her own expense. England has been taught wisdom, 
and has paid dearly for it. German interests would 
find no support in the public mind. The exclusion 
of products of English industry from the Continental 
markets, by the German customs' league, severed any 
important ties of mutual interests between Germany 
and England. The ties which connected the sove- 
reign of England with German dominions and in- 
terests, are fortunately removed. If France were to 
advance to the Rhine, the unanimous voice of England 
would be, " This is no business of ours. The people 
on the left side of the Rhine know best whether they 
prefer the French or the Prussian government. It 
is no interest of ours to uphold the divisions of ter- 
ritory made by the Congress of Vienna, which were 
unprincipled in themselves, and have been repudiated 
in turns by all." An advance even of Russia to the 
Oder or the Elbe, would be received in England with 
much more apathy than the Germans imagine. The 
common sense of the English people would say : " If 
Germany, after a peace of thirty-three years, has not 
the means — the money as well as the men — to de- 
fend herself, she is a country utterly helpless and 
incapable of maintaining her own independence. We 
must consider her conquerors as the permanent mas- 
ters, and trade with them, since trade is naturally 
our vocation, and probably on no worse terms than 
with their predecessors." A Landwehr army, without 
the financial means to move it, is a gun without gun- 
powder. In the war of 1813, 1814, the zeal and 
enthusiasm of the people to expel the French, raised a 
Landwehr or Landsturm army over all Germany, and 
supported it by English subsidies and by the volun- 
tary contributions of the country, until the army 



EXAMINED. — A STANDING AEMY. 255 

crossed the Rhine and supported itself at the expense 
of France. But it is not wise to keep the bow always 
bent — to keep a people always in the attitude and 
preparation for defence, which the hour of danger 
and excitement called forth. It is possible, that 
after calling Wolf ! Wolf ! for thirty years, to keep the 
people on the alert and ready to repel aggression 
from France or Russia ; when the wolf actually does 
come, the old fable may be realised. 

The prejudice in England is against a standing 
army. It is considered a less constitutional force 
than a militia or Landwehr. The prejudice is derived 
probably from the times of Charles I. and Cromwell. 
The danger of a standing army to a free constitu- 
tional state, depends altogether upon the hand into 
which the weapon is entrusted, and upon the checks 
and restraints upon any possible abuse of it. Where 
the parliament holds the purse, as in our constitu- 
tion, the danger of a military commander, or sove- 
reign, or executive power, using the standing army as 
a tool for the subversion of liberty, is altogether vi- 
sionary. We are two centuries past such a possibility. 
The advantages of a standing army compared to a 
Landwehr are obvious. The standing army sets free 
the other classes of society from military services. It 
is their substitute standing for the nation, as the sub- 
stitute stands for the individual, and with the same 
social advantage of allowing the nation as the indi- 
vidual, with perfect safety to the state, to follow the 
occupations of industry without interruption. Stand- 
ing armies, instead of the personal military service of 
all the able-bodied male population, are in fact one of 
the great steps in the progress of modern civilisation. 



256 DEMORALISING EFFECTS OF THE LANDWEHR. 

The German Landwehr is a backward step ; not, as the 
Germans suppose, a step in advance. 

The events of 1848, 1849, afford a striking proof 
of the demoralising influence of the Landwehr system 
on the mind and spirit of the German people, in the 
rabid eagerness with which they have rushed into the 
unnecessary and unjust war against Denmark. No 
state necessity existed ; no political cause justifies or 
palliates this resort to arms. Denmark is too feeble 
to have refused the arbitration of any third power on 
the claims of Germany to the territory of Schleswig, 
or to have declined submission to the decision of an 
arbiter ; but the public craving for warfare, right or 
wrong, raised by the false education of the people in 
military occupations, compelled the Prussian govern- 
ment into this war. The voice of the youth trained 
to consider war as the highest destination of man, 
forced the German sovereigns, perhaps against their 
own sense of justice and policy, to march an army of 
80,000 men to lay waste and conquer a district of 
about 300,000 inhabitants — a district not so popu- 
lous or important as the county of Norfolk. The 
common man may be excused for giving way to this 
savage ardour for war, which a false education has 
given him. He rushes with animal ferocity and a 
rabid joy to the combat, and to the scenes of blood- 
shed for which he has been in training for the three 
best years of his youth. But the Germans of the 
highest class have been demoralised by this false 
education, and even princes — a prince of Saxe Coburg 
for instance — gloried in marching at the head of an 
army of 80,000 men, to ravage and lay waste a little 
territory scarcely containing so many grown up male 
inhabitants, and defended by 16,000 or 18,000 Da- 



THE THREE NEW SOCIAL ELEMENTS. 257 

nish soldiers. It is not the well-meaning members of 
the Peace Congress only, but the loyal and reflecting 
English gentlemen who must regret to see princes so 
nearly allied to our royal family lending themselves 
to this unprincipled and inglorious warfare, and 
deservedly incurring the reprobation of all right- 
thinking men in England. They will meet with their 
desert in the page of history, and in the estimation of 
their contemporaries. They had not the excuse or 
justification of the Landwehr men or officers they led, 
that their position left them no choice but to follow 
and obey their military commanders. It is some 
gratification to outraged humanity that these volun- 
teer commanders in this unprincipled warfare — 
princes so nearly connected with our royal race, that 
England would have delighted to esteem and honour 
them — have gathered no laurels in their two inglorious 
campaigns. Their petty exploits and victories have 
all the air of defeats ; and if victories, yet with such 
superiority of numbers and means they will only 
meet the derision of the future historian, as they do 
now the scorn of the true soldier. 

The three new elements which have entered into, 
and become predominant in, the social system of the 
Continent since the French revolution, viz. the diffu- 
sion of landed property through the social body, 
functionarism, and the Landwehr institution, have not 
certainly as yet promoted the well-being, liberty, 
peace, and good government of the Continental people. 
They are, it must be confessed, more enslaved by their 
Landwehr service, their functionary system, and their 
educational system, than they were in the middle 
ages under their feudal lords. This is a state of so- 
ciety that cannot last. It is unsuitable to the re- 



258 EFFECTS OF OVER-TAXATION AND 

quirements of the people of the nineteeth century. 
Fearful convulsions may be expected before the pre- 
sent transition state from feudal to liberal social 
institutions and character has settled down perma- 
nently, and the new elements are cemented together. 
In the foregoing Notes I have endeavoured to explain 
the nature and tendencies of these three elements. 
They are unknown in our social system, and are 
generally overlooked by our travellers on the Conti- 
nent ; but in them will be found the key to many of 
the late social convulsions in Germany, and to many 
future convulsions to which the past are but a feeble 
prelude. The tendency, at the present day, of these 
new social elements are to a retrogression of society 
in civilisation, liberty, well-being, and peace, not to 
an advance. 

From Stockholm to Naples the public buildings in 
all the cities, and even third-rate towns, through 
which the traveller may pass, exceed in magnitude, 
splendour, and taste, the edifices of the same class and 
for the same purposes in Britain. The palaces, go- 
vernment offices, town-halls or stadthouses, theatres, 
churches, and all ecclesiastical buildings, and all con- 
nected with public business, are on a scale of magni- 
ficence unknown to us. The poorest states, Denmark, 
Sweden, and the petty principalities in Germany, 
appear to have been the most lavish in this kind of 
expenditure. Taxes, which abstract from industry its 
stimulus and reward, have been applied to rearing 
edifices which, if not useless, are at least unnecessary 
on such an expensive scale ; and the earnings wrung 
from the people by taxation, should have accumulated 
into a working capital the want of which is now 
felt severely in all the social relations of Germany. 



USELESS EXPENDITURE BY THE STATE. 259 

The want of a working capital giving employment in 
every branch of industry, and the want of means to 
buy and consume what industry produces, are evils 
which threaten to arrest the progress of society on 
the Continent to any higher state than it has attained, 
which even threaten it with a retrograde movement 
in its material well-being, in proportion to the in- 
crease of population, and of which the roots may be 
traced to the unwise over-taxation and expenditure of 
the governments. The system still goes on ; for the 
time and labour of the community are directly and 
heavily taxed by the Landwehr system for the most 
unreproductive of objects — military reviews and ma- 
noeuvres — in every part of Germany. A great deal 
of the public capital has also been sunk all over the 
Continent in constructing fortifications, or at least 
walls and ditches, round every little town. Small, 
indeed, must the place be, that has not its gates and 
walls as well as its town-house. The traveller in 
Germany finds out at last, that the two — fortification 
and taxation — always go together ; and that it is not 
the military importance of those little towns, either 
in past or present times, that has raised them to the 
dignity of walls and gates, but the municipal im- 
portance of these defences against the introduction, 
clandestinely, of articles subject to the town taxes. 
The traveller, amidst all the expenditure on magni- 
ficent public buildings, and the town mansions or 
hotels of the class no longer opulent, the nobles, 
misses on the roads of France and Germany the 
country seat in the midst of its park, adorned with 
old trees and a piece of water, and with its gardens, 
its closely shaven lawn, smooth gravel walks, and 
long avenue through lofty elms, and its elegant en- 

s 2 



260 EMPLOYMENT OF CONVICT LABOUR. 

trance-gate and cottage-lodges at the side of the turn- 
pike-road, and all so neatly kept and trim, that going 
into the grounds is like going into a drawing-room. 
Such an establishment as an English country gentle- 
man's seat is scarcely to be seen on the Continent. It 
is the exponent of a peculiar social state and cha- 
racter. The taste and talent of an artist may rear 
Italian or Gothic edifices in a country, but it requires 
a combination of congenial tastes and characters in 
every station, from the squire's to the stable-boy's, 
and the labourer's who sweeps the lawn, to keep all 
that belongs to that peculiarly English feature of 
England, the country gentleman's residence, in all its 
neatness and beauty. 

A great proportion of the walls, ditches, fortifica- 
tions, and public buildings of the Continental towns, 
are constructed by penal labour. Offenders are con- 
demned to work on these public edifices and fortifica- 
tions, and there is no other way of disposing of them. 
It is surprising that our government has not adopted, 
to a greater extent, the same means of employing 
convict labour at home, instead of an expensive trans- 
portation to Gibraltar, Bermuda, or Australia, and 
the application of convict labour in the same way 
in those colonies. We have not at home any strong, 
regularly fortified place to which the sovereign could 
retire in the event of invasion from abroad or tumults 
at home. There are many military points which, 
however unlikely it may be that such events as the 
invasion of the country by an enemy, or rebellion and 
organised tumult of our own population, should ever 
take place, ought not to be left unguarded and unpre- 
pared for defence. The 336 fortresses or garrisoned 
towns in the Prussian dominions, may be an unneces- 



EMPLOYMENT OF CONVICT LABOUR. 261 

sary extension of the system ; and in the war against 
Napoleon which preceded the Peace of Tilsit, were a 
main cause of the rapid success of the French arms in 
that campaign. The Prussian army was frittered down 
into isolated garrisons too weak to defend their posts, 
or to arrest the advance of the enemy. But thirty 
or forty places of strength in this country, command- 
ing the access to our main railways and roads, would 
neither be ridiculously unnecessary nor costly. We 
have, unhappily, too much of convict labour to apply 
to such constructions, we have officers of skill and 
science to construct them, we have property to de- 
fend, and every rational motive to retard any hostile 
movement, either by a foreign or domestic foe, in the 
land, and we have scarcely a strong place in the 
kingdom that could hold out for ten days against 
an enemy. The constitutional objection to strong- 
holds in the hands of the executive power belongs to 
the age of King Stephen, not to our times ; or to the 
policy of Louis Philippe, not to our constitutional 
monarchy. 

Transportation must be less efficacious as a punish- 
ment for deterring from crime, and amending the 
criminal, than hard labour in chains on public works. 
The infliction of the latter punishment follows the 
conviction at once, and in its full severity. The 
delay, the change of scene, the voyage, the excite- 
ment, weaken the effects of transportation. The 
public see nothing of the infliction, will scarcely be- 
lieve in its severity and impartiality, and lose the 
example of retribution overtaking guilt displayed 
before their eyes. To withdraw the criminal under 
punishment from the public view is grateful, no doubt, 
to his feelings and to the feelings of the public ; but 

s 3 



262 THREE ELEMENTS IN PENAL LAW. 

the benefit of deterring others from similar crimes is 
lost. Transportation for life may possibly be as 
severe a punishment as death itself; but will the rude 
and blunted feelings of the criminal class in the social 
body, and of those verging towards crime, ever be 
brought to consider it equally dreadful to be trans- 
ported as to be hanged ? 

Many pious and humane persons, in England, are 
very desirous that the punishment of death should be 
entirely abolished ; and meetings, committees, resolu- 
tions, speeches, and petitions to parliament in favour 
of such a change in our penal code, are not wanting. 
Yet this subject is not investigated so profoundly as 
the public are entitled to expect from the able and 
religious men who lead the agitation. If we look at 
the punishment inflicted on the guilty by the penal 
laws of all ages and countries, we find in it three 
distinct elements. One is the expiation of the crime 
by the punishment. This is the oldest and most 
universal of all the principles of punishment, and in 
it only is the punishment of death necessarily in- 
volved. The second element in punishment is the 
protection of society from the same or similar of- 
fences by the punishment of the offenders promptly, 
severely, but judicially and justly. This principle of 
punishment belongs to a considerably advanced state 
of civilisation, and does by no means infer, neces- 
sarily, the punishment of death for crime. Other 
means to deter from crime, and all the means of pre- 
vention by moral and religious education, temperance, 
and domestic habits, remove certainly the necessity 
of resorting to the punishment of death for the pro- 
tection of society. The third element in punishment 
is the amendment of the offender. This is altogether 



ABOLITION OF THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH. 263 

a modern principle in penal infliction ; and, although 
very generally attempted, it is practically rather a 
pious intent than a realised effect. It excludes, of 
course, the punishment of death. Now, of these three 
elements involved in all punishment, the first, the 
expiation of guilt by punishment, is the great diffi- 
culty to be dealt with in the abolition of capital 
punishment for great crimes. But for this element 
in penal infliction, the punishment of death might 
perhaps be safely abolished among an educated, 
moral, and religious people. Then why not throw 
it out altogether, as an element in the punishments 
enacted in the penal code of an enlightened commu- 
nity ? Do the humane and Christian men, clergy 
and laity, who adopt and urge these views on the 
legislature in meetings and petitions for the abolition 
of capital punishment, know exactly their own mean- 
ing ? Do they consider that, if they abolish the ex- 
piatory element in punishment for guilt and sin, they 
abolish the very basis on which Christianity is founded? 
Is it not the expiation made for sin by our Saviour 
in his physical sufferings on the cross, and the pro- 
bably still greater moral sufferings in the agony in 
the garden of Gethsemane preceding the crucifixion, 
the equivalent to the remorse and penitence which, 
together with the physical suffering, make up the 
expiatory sacrifice, which are the very foundations 
of their hopes of salvation ? Abolish the principle of 
expiation by punishment, and you abolish the atone- 
ment by our Saviour. It is very cruel to put a male- 
factor to death, even for crimes of the deepest dye. 
So it is. It is not only cruel, but, as in the case of 
the Mannings executed lately for a foul murder, it 
is altogether inoperative as a means of deterring from 

s 4 



264 WHY CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, AS AN 

crime ; and, as an eminent writer forcibly described 
it, the execution was rather a show, an excitement, 
even a merry meeting, to the profligate and criminal 
population, who sat up all night to witness it. This 
is all very true, but still the question remains. Is 
punishment, that is to say, physical suffering for 
guilt and sin, expiatory in its nature, or not ? If not, 
then away with Christianity, for the Christian re- 
ligion rests on nothing else. If it be, then away with 
the false and maudlin humanity that would sacrifice 
the principle of the Christian religion to tenderness 
of feeling for a murderer. The expiation of guilt by 
punishment is not a principle derived or deduced by 
reasoning from the atonement by our Saviour's death 
on the cross, and innoculated into society and the 
public mind in the middle ages by Christianity and 
the clergy. It is a principle much more ancient than 
the Christian religion itself. It prevailed, and pre- 
vails now, among nations who never heard of Christi- 
anity. It is, in fact, one of the great proofs of the 
truth of the Christian doctrine to every reflecting 
mind, that it is founded on a principle of atonement, 
the same principle on which our Saviour died for 
man, acknowledged in every human breast and in 
every stage of human existence, however rude. Next 
to the universality of the idea of a Supreme Being 
is the universality of the idea of atonement. In the 
most ancient codes of law, among the unchristianised 
Gothic and Scandinavian tribes, we find no other 
element but atonement in punishment. In that rude 
state of society in which every man protected his own 
head with his own hand, revenge or pecuniary compen- 
sation to the parties injured by the crime were expi- 
atory. If the family was satisfied for the slaughter 



EXPIATION FOR CRIME, CANNOT BE ABOLISHED. 265 

of a relative, and the state or king for the loss of a 
man, by a fine proportioned to the rank and station 
of the victim, divided between the family and the 
state, murder and every crime could be atoned for 
according to a tariff. If we look at the influence of 
Christianity as a social institution only, and apart 
from its religious value, we find that its greatest and 
most civilising influence has been the taking of ex- 
piatory punishment out of the hands of the private 
avenger, or of the cupidity or arbitrary will of the 
sovereign, and lodging it in fixed law and religious 
principle. If the humane and pious men who would 
abolish by act of parliament the expiatory element 
in punishment, are consequent in their reasoning, 
they must frame the preamble of their act for the 
abolition of the punishment of death in all cases, in 
terms equivalent to these : — "Whereas, it is expedient 
to abolish the punishment of death as unnecessary 
for the protection of society, inoperative for the pre- 
vention of crime or the amendment of criminals, and 
contrary to the feelings of the humane and pious ; 
and whereas, the said infliction of capital punishment 
rests solely on certain doctrines of atonement con- 
tained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testa- 
ment, and on no social or moral grounds of necessity 
or utility ; be it therefore enacted, that the said pu- 
nishment of death and the doctrine of atonement, as 
taught by the Christian religion, upon which alone it 
is founded; shall cease and be abolished from and 
after the passing of this act." 

In legislation, as in private conduct, the great dif- 
ficulty of reform is to prune away abuses without 
cutting down principles. The abuses in our old 
penal code, when stealing a sheep on the common, or 



266 WHY CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 

a web of cloth in a bleach-field, or forging a country 
banker's one pound note, were crimes punished by 
death, although manifestly it was the duty of the 
farmer or manufacturer to watch his property so that 
it could not be stolen, and of the banker to print his 
notes with such marks that they could not be forged, 
raised justly in all humane minds a storm of indig- 
nation against such judicial murders ; and although 
these abuses have been rectified, the movement has not 
yet subsided. The abolition of capital punishment 
in all cases is called for, although cases occur almost 
daily, in which, if the protection of society or the 
prevention of similar crimes were the only principles 
on which punishment ought to be awarded, the more 
atrocious the crime the fewer would be the imitators 
of the criminal, and the more entitled would the 
criminal be to escape from all punishment not di- 
rectly connected with his personal reformation. If 
society could not suffer by his impunity, owing to the 
singular wickedness of his deeds repelling all imi- 
tation, on what principle can he be punished at all? 
It is very possible, that among the two millions of 
people in London and its environs, no two persons, 
husband and wife, could be found who would be ca- 
pable of premeditating and preparing a murder so 
deliberately, and perpetrating the crime so coolly and 
firmly as Mrs. Manning and her husband did, in the 
murder of their victim. Then why put them to 
death for a crime which, from its very atrocity, could 
have so few imitators to be deterred from a similar 
crime by the example of their punishment ? Clearly 
because there was a higher principle involved than 
that of the mere police consideration of the protection 
of society, the prevention of crime, or the amendment 



CANNOT BE ABOLISHED. 267 

of the malefactor. There was the atonement to be 
made for guilt. This principle of expiation by suf- 
fering, is admitted and acted upon in all punishments 
for minor offences, in which imprisonment, hard la- 
bour, or transportation for a term of years more or 
less protracted, are adjudged as expiatory punish- 
ments according to the degree of criminality. The 
offender returns to society after his atonement by 
punishment for his offence. It would not be very 
consistent legislation, that the lighter offenders should 
be punished most heavily, and the heaviest offenders 
most lightly. This would evidently be the case, if 
atonement by the severest of punishments for the 
most atrocious of crimes, were expunged from our 
criminal code, and atonement by punishment were 
retained for the lesser delinquencies. 

There seems to be no such feeling in the breast of 
the Continental man, be he Gentile or Jew, as that 
which prevents an honest tradesman in England from 
asking more for his goods than he intends to take. A 
shopkeeper with us, even in the lowest class, would 
feel it to be a degradation of himself to ask more at 
first than the just price, and his customer would feel 
it was a gratuitous insult, an implied doubt of the 
man's veracity and honesty, if he were to beat down 
the demand and offer less. On the Continent the 
most respectable man in trade will begin with asking 
a price one half higher than he will be content to 
take, and will tell half-a-dozen falsehoods to make 
you believe that the price he asks is fair and moderate. 
It betokens no very high moral tone of mind in the 
society — in the sellers and in the buyers — where 
this custom is universal. It is but a custom, people 
say ; and when you know the custom, it is your own 



268 THE CHARACTER OF THE CONTINENTAL PEOPLE 

fault and folly if you are cheated and give the price 
asked at first. True ; but still the custom is not an 
honest custom. It betokens want of self-respect in 
the seller, want of moral respect in the buyer for the 
man standing before him, and a want of confidence 
between man and man in the ordinary transactions 
of life ; and all these are indications of a low social 
character. The English are a nation of shopkeepers ; 
but these shopkeepers are gentlemen in their feelings 
of self-respect, and of honourable dealing with their 
customers, compared to the same class in the countries 
claiming a higher education and more chivalrous 
spirit. In Paris, and a few other cities of the Con- 
tinent, the shopkeepers begin now to place in their 
windows the announcement that they sell au prix 
fixe, and to do homage to the principle of fair dealing 
so universally acted upon for generations in England. 
It is not the dealer alone who is to be blamed for 
having two prices for his goods, but his customers, 
the public. They have not the confidence which 
honest men have in honest men in our social state, 
and will attempt to beat down the dealer's prices, and 
offer him less, even when they know the prices asked 
are fair and reasonable. This custom is but a trivial 
thing to notice ; yet, considered in its true light, it in- 
dicates more than any other the inferiority of the 
social character, and of the moral tone of the middle 
and lower classes of society on the Continent, com- 
pared to that of the same classes in England. The 
self-respect,, the sentiment of individual worth, the 
mutual confidence between man and man in the fair 
dealing and integrity of each other, which are both 
the effects and causes of a sound moral feeling in 
society, and of a high social character adapted to in- 



NOT ADAPTED TO FREE INSTITUTIONS. 269 

dependent action, are wanting, and these form the 
basis of civil liberty and constitutional government. 
The moral condition and political constitution of a 
people are closely united. The Continental people 
may give themselves the English forms of government, 
a representation of the people in a legislative assembly, 
trial by jury, a habeas corpus act, and freedom of the 
press ; but they will still retain the character which 
ages of a feudal structure of society, followed by gene- 
rations bred under modern military government, and 
superintendence over private business and all civil 
affairs, have formed in the individuals. Their po- 
litical institutions will not be the natural result of 
their spirit, character, and moral and social state. It 
will be the show, not the reality, of liberty they 
have attained ; for they are not prepared for self- 
government, independent action, and civil freedom. 
The mere imitation of the external forms and in- 
stitutions of a free constitution, will not make a free 
people of men not bred and trained individually by 
the social circumstances in which they have lived, to 
self-guidance, independence of character and action, 
and to self-respect. The English constitution rests 
upon the English character, and that character has 
been prepared for ages. The imitation constitutions 
in France and Germany are but things on paper, 
philosophical schemes and speculations acted, as on a 
theatre, without reality ; and are not the natural re- 
sults of a moral and social state actually existing, and 
requiring such institutions. The new governments on 
the liberal principle have to form a character in the 
people to support them and work them, and are not 
called into existence and formed by a social character 
and spirit previously existing. 



270 TRUE LIBERTY NOT UNDERSTOOD BY 

A history of liberty, or of liberal constitutions, 
would be a curious display of the inconsistencies of 
human nature. Roman, American, and West India 
liberty always held, as an element in the social 
structure of a free people, a large proportion of the 
human beings under its institutions as slaves. In 
France, Switzerland, Belgium, and the constitutional 
states in Germany, people call themselves free, because 
they enjoy more or less of the forms of a representa- 
tive government, and have more or less political 
liberty ; but they have no more civil liberty, and no 
more sense or feeling for it, than when they had no 
constitutions at all. They live, act, and have their 
being under a system of interference in every man's 
movements and doings, precisely as in Austria, 
Prussia, and the states without any constitutions or 
political liberty. The people of the Continent are 
like a tamed animal, incapable of living in a free 
state, or of acting for itself, and returning to its coop 
and its keeper, because it can do nothing for itself 
in freedom, and is insensible of the trammels and 
bondage it is used to. Give the Continental man, even 
of the most enlightened class, political liberty, that is, 
a legislative assembly in which he and his fellow-citi- 
zens are fairly represented, and may freely harangue ; 
give him freedom of the press, freedom of discussion, 
freedom to talk politics in his club or coffee-room, and 
to belong to a party for or against the ministers and 
their measures, and he has all he wants, desires, or 
knows of freedom, and he sits down perfectly satisfied 
that he is free. Yet he cannot go to the next town 
on business or pleasure without a passport, cannot 
remove his domicile without leave, cannot apply his 
labour, skill, and capital in any way without per- 



THE CONTINENTAL PEOPLE. 271 

mission, regulation, and superintendence ; and these 
restrictions on the civil liberty of the individual are 
the same in France, Belgium, Bavaria with repre- 
sentative legislatures, as in Austria, Prussia, or Den- 
mark without any. The show and forms of political 
liberty are all the Continental man means, in all his 
enthusiasm for freedom and free institutions. The 
reality of civil liberty in the free use of time, industry, 
and capital, and in the free action of the individual, 
is unknown to him. It is amusing to hear a German 
or a Frenchman discussing constitutional forms of 
government, universal suffrage, the qualifications of 
representatives, the equal rights of citizens ; and when 
he has settled all these points to his satisfaction, in a 
theory that proves very clearly we enjoy no real 
liberty in England, and do not understand its first 
principles, to ask him to take a jaunt with you to 
Tours or Marseilles, or to Cologne or Leipsic. " Oh ! " 
says he, u I must run to the bureau for our passports. 
I must get them signed by the proper authorities, 
countersigned by other proper authorities, viseed by 
the proper authorities in every town we stop at on 
our journey, to prevent trouble with the police ; and 
I must get this done before the bureaux are shut for 
the day, or we may have to wait till next day." To 
be free and independent in the sense that the common 
man in England is free and independent, seems not 
to be a want in the mind of the Continental man even 
of fortune and education. The English traveller in 
France or Germany, who has gone himself to the 
Hotel de Ville or the Passport Office, to have his 
passport viseed and signed, instead of leaving it to 
the valet de place, or the master of the hotel, and who 
has seen the crowd of tradesmen, country dealers, 



272 POLITICAL AND CIVIL LIBERTY. 

travelling artisans, and peasants from the neigh- 
bouring villages who have been at the fair, standing 
for hours to have their papers examined and signed, 
will return with a pretty distinct idea of the difference 
between political and civil freedom — between show 
and reality — between the mind, spirit, character, and 
social state of the English and of the Continental 
people. Machiavel says somewhere in his works : — 
" To endeavour to make a people free who are servile 
in their nature, is as hopeless as to attempt to reduce 
to slavery a nation imbued with the spirit of freedom." 
This is a great truth in social economy, confirmed by 
the issue of every revolution or attempt in this 
century, to make the French, the German, or the 
Italian people free. The forms of a free constitution 
are attained for a short time ; but the servile nature 
remains, the servile institutions, the restraints on 
personal liberty, industry, and action remain, and are 
not felt to be bondage. Such a people cannot be 
free, even with freedom pressed upon them. 



TOWN POPULATIONS ABROAD. 273 



CHAP. XII. 

NOTES ON THE TOWN AND COUNTRY POPULATIONS ABROAD AND IN 
ENGLAND. — ON THE VICE AND PROFLIGACY OF LONDON COM- 
PARED TO OTHER CAPITALS. — PROSTITUTION IN LONDON IN 

PARIS. — MORAL CONDITION OF THE LONDON POPULATION. 

HABITS, CHARACTER, AND SOCIAL STATE OF THE ENGLISH AND 
SCOTCH COMPARED. MORAL TLE IN ENGLAND BETWEEN LAND- 
LORD AND TENANT. — ON THE COMPARATIVE WELL-BEING OF THE 

WORKING MAN ON THE CONTINENT AND IN ENGLAND. ON THE 

BURDENS ON THE CONTINENTAL WORKING MAN. — MILITARY SER- 
VICE. — DIRECT TAXES. KOPFSTEUER OR POLL TAX.— GEWERB- 

* STEUER OR TRADE TAX. CLASS-TAX IN PRUSSIA, HANOVER, 

ETC. DIRECT AND INDIRECT TAXES COMPARED. INJUSTICE OF 

DHtECT TAXATION AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR DIRECT TAXES. 

HIGHER WELL-BEING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS. — AD- 
VANTAGE OF THE CONTINENTAL WORKING CLASS IN THE EASIER 
ACQUISITION OF LAND. 

The main use of travelling abroad is to form just 
ideas of what is around us at home. The traveller 
should be a man of comparisons, measuring, weighing, 
and correcting his old ideas by his new. He is not 
straying beyond his proper vocation and business 
when he states his old impressions, and his new, of 
the social condition of people at home compared with 
people or classes in similar situations abroad. 

Every traveller on the Continent must have ob- 
served, that the town and city populations live much 
more apart and separate from the country population 
than with us. Each city or town is like a distinct 
island, or small nation, with its own way of living, 
ideas, laws, and interests, and having little or nothing 
in common with the country population around it. 

T 



2 74 TOWN AND COUNTRY POPULATIONS 

The ancient municipal governments of the towns, 
with their exclusive privileges, their incorporations, 
and town-taxes on all articles brought to market, and 
levied at the town-gates in a rough vexatious way, 
keep alive a spirit of hostility rather than of friendly 
intercourse between town and country. Some of 
these grievances exist where the traveller least ex- 
pects to find them. In constitutional France, in con- 
stitutional Belgium, and even in the city of Frankfort, 
where a model constitution of civil and political liberty 
was being manufactured by all the philosophy of Ger- 
many in a constituent assembly, the country-girl's 
basket is opened at the town-gate, to see if it contain 
any bread, cheese, beer, or other articles subject to 
town-dues. The peasant's cart, loaded with hay or 
straw, is half unloaded, or is probed with a long rod 
of iron by the city official, to discover goods which 
ought to have paid town dues. The kind of domestic 
smuggling into and out of the Continental cities, 
which this system of town dues gives rise to, is of a 
very demoralising influence. These restrictions and 
town dues raise a spirit of antagonism, not of union, 
between the two populations. The towns and cities, 
in consequence of this estrangement, have less influ- 
ence on the civilisation of the country, on the man- 
ners, ideas, and condition of the mass of the population, 
than with us. Our town or city populations form no 
mass so distinct in privileges, intelligence, and inter- 
ests from the rest of the community, as the town 
populations are abroad. The city on the Continent 
sits like a guard-ship riding at anchor on the plain, 
keeping up a kind of social existence of her own, 
shutting her gates at sunset, and having privileges 
and exactions which separate her from the main 



ON THE CONTINENT DIVIDED. 275 

body of the population. In Germany and France, 
the movements and agitations of 1848 were entirely 
among the town populations. The country popula- 
tion has not advanced either towards good or evil 
with the progress of the cities. In Hamburgh, Berlin, 
Munich, Dresden, Frankfort, and other great cities, 
taste, literature, refinement, wealth, or the pleasures 
and enjoyments proper to wealth, abound ; but in the 
country outside of these oases of civilisation, the 
people are in the same condition in which they have 
been for ages. The town civilisation has not acted 
upon them as it has on the general population of 
England. The people of the Continent have more 
coffee, sugar, tobacco, and music, and more school 
and drill than their forefathers ; but not more civil 
liberty or freedom of action, not more independence 
of mind, nor a higher moral, religious, and intellectual 
character. This isolation of the towns has had a very 
prejudicial effect both on the town and country popu- 
lations. It has kept the latter almost stationary, 
while the former has been advancing out of all pro- 
portion to the great body, or to the means, intelli- 
gence, or requirements of the state or the people. 
This has divided the people of Germany into two dis- 
tinct divisions : the great mass of the population, 
living by husbandry, and altogether unprepared for 
self-government or civil or political liberty ; and an 
educated, or half-educated, idle, and debauched city 
population, half crazed with theories and dreams of 
an unattainable perfection of society. 

The traveller who compares the condition and 
spirit of the Continental and English populations, 
must begin with correcting his old impressions of the 

T 2 



276 MORAL STATE OF LONDON. 

great leviathan of London, the concentrated exhibi- 
tion of all that is good and evil in modern society. 

We hear much of the vice and profligacy of London, 
and the theme is not altogether new. Nemo in ea 
sine crimine vivit, said Richard of Devizes concerning 
London in the twelfth century. It is a standing-dish, 
like muffins and buttered toast, at the tea-table of 
every spinster who sits down with the curate and 
five serious ladies of fifty, to deplore the adulteration 
of Bohea and the moral depravity of mankind. The 
truth is, that the clergyman in his parish, the magis- 
trate in his district, the overseer, constable, or police 
officer in his ward or walk, has an official propensity 
to describe his own circle of duty and action as among 
people the most vicious, depraved, and turbulent 
within the bills of mortality, the most difficult to be 
kept in order, sunk in ignorance, vice, and misery, 
every street teeming with thieves and abandoned wo- 
men, and society only held together by his own unseen 
and not sufficiently appreciated wisdom and exertions. 
The statistical writer, too, and the legislator in small, 
are nothing loath to give the interest of enormity and 
magnitude to their statements of the vice and profli- 
gacy of the lower orders in London ; and some of 
them lay it pretty thick on the public credulity. 
About forty years ago, Colquhoun, a police magis- 
trate, gravely estimated the number of females in 
London living by prostitution at 50,000 ; and, in 1834, 
Yilleneuf de Bargemont estimates the number at 
80,000. But in a population of a million, at which 
number we may reckon all the London population 
that can, from local situation and circumstances, be at 
all within the walk or range of the existence of pro- 
stitution, the number of the female sex who have com- 



PROSTITUTION AND VICE EXAGGERATED. 277 

pleted their sixteenth year, but not their forty-fifth 
(and from sixteen to forty-five years of age are surely 
the usual limits of this wretched state) would be., ac- 
cording to Hoffman's calculations, 211,601 persons. 
Of these, according to the estimates of the same sta- 
tistical writer, more than one-half (about five-ninths) 
are married women, and therefore, notwithstanding 
exceptional cases, may, in a general view, be taken out 
of the number of females living by prostitution, or 
belonging to the class of public prostitutes. Taking 
the unmarried females at one-half of all between the 
ages of sixteen and forty-five years, we have 105,800 
females ; and from this number the aged, the infants, 
the sick, the lame, the decrepit, the ugly, the ill- 
favoured, the rich, the well-off, all above destitution, 
and the virtuous, must be deducted, before we get at 
the approximate number who may be by possibility, 
or at least are not prevented by physical or moral 
circumstances from, earning their living by prostitu- 
tion. What proportion shall we allow for age, infancy, 
sickness, bodily defects, and all other physical hin- 
derances to earning a- living as prostitutes ? Not less 
surely than one third, or 35,266 females; thus leaving 
in a million of people only 70,534 females unmarried, 
and of the age, health, and appearance that they could 
lead the life of prostitutes, and without making any 
deduction for the restraints of moral and religious 
principle, or for the social rank, station, affluence, or 
honest means of living of the 70,534 females. Yet 
one statistical police writer would cram us with the 
estimate of 50,000 prostitutes out of 70,500 females ; 
and another would have every one of them, and 10,000 
more, to be living by prostitution ! They could not 
live by prostitution in that proportion to the whole 

T 3 



278 MORAL STATE OF LONDON. 

male population in a million of people, even if they 
would. These are but exaggerations of police officers 
and statistical writers, which refute themselves by 
their extravagance. They tell us of 40,000 pick- 
pockets, thieves, and vagabonds always prowling 
about in our metropolis ; of 40,000 rogues who do not 
know when they rise in the morning where they shall 
lie down at night ; of gangs of housebreakers and 
robbers enough to sack the city of London. They 
tell us, in short, of a state of society in London such 
that society could not exist if one half of their state- 
ments were true. 

If we stick one prong of a gigantic carving-fork 
through the dome of St. Paul's — it may be done in 
imagination, or still better on the half-crown map of 
London and its environs — and describe a circle with 
the other prong, at the distance of twenty miles or so 
from this centre, we find the inhabitants within this 
circle constitute, in our railway and omnibus age, the 
London nation, the people who live, move, and have 
their daily being in the streets of London. The popu- 
lation of this kingdom of Cockneyland exceeds that of 
Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Han- 
over, Saxony, or Wiirtemberg ; and its wealth would 
buy all the property of half a dozen of these small 
kingdoms. Now, where 3,000,000 of people, the least 
number we can reckon within this circle (London and 
Westminster containing 2,200,000 in 1849, according 
to official estimates), and a vast proportion of the 
total wealth of the whole human race are concen- 
trated, together with all the gratifications which 
wealth can purchase, within a circle round St. Paul's 
of twenty miles of radius, luxury, extravagance, dis- 
sipation, self-indulgence, and also the progeny of 



PROSTITUTION IN LONDON. 279 

these, poverty, vice, misery, must exist close together, 
and in very imposing masses ; so imposing from their 
magnitude that we are very apt to mistake a part for 
the whole, to pronounce all London one scene of pro- 
fligacy and misery, or perhaps one scene of bound- 
less wealth, generosity, and public spirit, according 
to the sample of it we have seen. If we take any 
one of the exaggerations of London profligacy, for 
instance prostitution, which is the most common 
and most exaggerated, and examine its proportion to 
the population, and to the circumstances of the popu- 
lation, all the huge dimensions even of this social 
evil shrink into the ordinary size in which it exists in 
other communities. It looks large in London ; be- 
cause it is concentrated and under the eye in one 
city, and in a few main streets of it. In the most 
virtuous town-populations under the most favourable 
circumstances — that is, where the population is so 
small that each individual is known, and his or her 
conduct and character are under the restraint of re- 
mark and observation, as well as under moral and 
religious restraint — the average number of the un- 
fortunate women of this class will certainly not 
exceed the proportion of one in a thousand of the 
total population. This average would give about 
3000 as the number of females living by prostitution 
in the 3,000,000 of people within a circle of twenty 
miles round St. Paul's. If we consider the peculiar 
circumstances of this population, the greater propor- 
tion individually strangers to their next neighbours, 
living in an afflux of strangers, and being unknown 
and unobserved, under none of the secondary re- 
straints on conduct, but left entirely to the moral and 
religious restraints within themselves, it Avould not 

T 4 



280 PKOSTITUTION IN PAKIS. 

be an indication of a proportionally greater depravity 
of the fixed inhabitants of London, if the proportion 
of prostitution were double of that among a popula- 
tion of the same numbers scattered in small towns, in 
which every individual has a check upon immoral con- 
duct in the good or bad opinion of his neighbours, as 
well as in moral and religious restraint. But no man 
acquainted with London would estimate the total 
number of unfortunate women living by prostitution 
so high as 6000. A few leading streets and places of 
public resort appear filled with them, but a small 
number of people, for instance 4000 or 5000 police- 
men or soldiers, appears great when confined, as these 
unfortunate females are by their vocation, to a few 
crowded localities. The state of Paris in regard to 
prostitution bears out this view of the state of Lon- 
don. The population of Paris is certainly not more 
chaste, more domestic in habits, more under religious 
and moral influences, more virtuous, and less addicted 
to sensual gratification, than the London population. 
Different estimates had been given of the number of 
prostitutes in Paris, varying from 30,000 to 60,000, 
according to the imagination of the statistical writer. 
But at last Parent du Chatelet, in his work " De la 
Prostitution," showed from the registers of the police 
— the unfortunate women of this class in Paris are 
all registered, licensed, and under police protection, 
and none can remain, or have any motive to remain, 
unregistered — that in the four years, from 1816 to 
1-820 — a period in which Paris was crowded with 
strangers and military from every part of Europe — 
the number never exceeded 2500 ; and in the years 
from 1830 to 1832 never exceeded 3500. It is pro- 
bable that in London, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, 



PRACTICAL VIRTUE IN LONDON. 281. 

and all great cities at home and abroad, the amount 
of this kind of profligacy and misery is very much 
the same in the same periods, and is very much less 
than statistical prosers and benevolent society orators 
represent it to be. The vice and ignorance of the 
vast London population is a fine subject for platform 
eloquence ; for whatever vice and ignorance there may 
be, it lies all in a heap before the eyes of the auditors, 
quite handy to the orator to point to it ; and is not 
scattered about in 500 towns, as it would be in a 
kingdom of the same population. 

To me the London nation appears remarkably dis- 
tinguished for their strong moral sense and their 
acute quick intelligence. In these no people in the 
most-educated, virtuous, or simple countries or dis- 
tricts, at home or abroad, can be compared to the 
Londoners. It stands to reason that this should be 
their character. They are a people living in the 
midst of temptation and opportunity, and therefore 
necessarily in the perpetual exercise, daily and hourly, 
of self-restraint and moral principle ; living in the 
midst of the keenest competition in every trade and 
branch of industry, and therefore necessarily in the 
perpetual exercise of ingenuity and mental power in 
every work and calling. The needy starving man in 
this population exerts every day, in walking through 
the streets of London, more practical virtue, more 
self-restraint and active virtuous principle, in with- 
standing temptation to dishonest immoral means of 
relieving his pressing want, and he struggles against 
and overcomes more of the vicious propensities of our 
nature, than the poor, or rich, or middle class man in 
a country population or small town population, has 
occasion to exercise in the course of a whole lifetime. 



282 HONESTY, TEMPERANCE, AND MORAL 

Man must live among men, and not in a state of iso- 
lation, to live in the highest moral condition of man. 
The London population may be far enough from this 
highest moral condition; but they are individually and 
practically educated by the circumstances in which 
they live, into high moral habits of honesty and 
self-restraint. Look at the exposure of property in 
London, and at the small amount of depredation in 
proportion to the vast amount of articles exposed to 
depredation in every street, lane, and shop ; and con- 
sider the total inadequacy of any police force, however 
numerous — and in all London the police force does 
not exceed five thousand persons — or of any vigilance 
on the part of the owners themselves, however strict, 
to guard this property, if it were not guarded by the 
general, habitual, thorough honesty of the population 
itself. Look at the temptations to inebriety, and the 
small proportion of the people totally abandoned to 
habitual drunkenness, or even to the hourly dram- 
drinking of Scotch people, or the Schnaps of the lower 
classes in Germ an v. Virtue is not the child of the 
desert or of the school-room, but of the dense assem- 
blages of mankind in which its social influences are 
called into action and into practical exertion every 
hour. The urchin on the pavement dancing Jim 
Crow for a chance halfpenny, and resisting in all his 
hunger the temptation of snatching the apple or the 
cake from the old woman's open stall or the pastry- 
cook's window, is morally no uneducated being. His 
sense of right, his self-restraint, his moral education, 
are as truly and highly cultivated as in the son of the 
bishop who is declaiming at Exeter Hall about this 
poor boy's ignorance and vice, and whose son never 
knew in his position what it is to resist pressing 



STATE OF THE LONDON POPULATION. 283 

temptation, secret opportunity, and the urgent call of 
hunger. Practical moral education, a religious regard 
for what belongs to others, the doing as you would be 
done by, the neighbourly sympathy with and help of 
real distress, and the generous glow at what is manly, 
bold, and right in common life, and the indignation 
at what is wrong, or base, are in more full develop- 
ment among the labouring class in London, than 
among the same class elsewhere, either at home or 
abroad. They put more of the fair-play feeling in 
their doings. The exceptions to this character ; the 
vice, immorality, blackguardism, brutality, of a com- 
paratively small number — -and many of these not born 
and bred in the lowest ranks, but in much higher 
positions from which they have sunk, besmeared with 
the vice, immorality, and dishonesty which caused 
their fall — cannot be justly taken as a measure of the 
moral condition of the lower or labouring classes in 
London. The genuine Cockneys are a good-natured 
hearty set of men ; their mobs are full of sport and 
rough play; and the ferocious spirit of mischief, wicked- 
ness, and bloodshed rarely predominates. Considering 
their great temptations and opportunities, and the 
inadequacy of any social arrangements or military 
or police force that Ave possess to oppose them, if a 
majority were inclined to active deeds of mischief, the 
London population may claim the highest place among 
the town populations of Europe, for a spirit of self- 
restraint on vicious propensities, and for a practical 
moral education in the right and reasonable. The 
tumults in 1848, in Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, 
entitle the London mobs to the praise of being neither 
blood-thirsty, nor insensible to the rights of propert} 7 , 
compared to the furious half-military mobs of those 



284 MORAL STATE OF THE SCOTCH 

cities. Compared even to the better-educated, or 
rather better-schooled, people of Scotland, the more 
practical, although more ignorant, Londoners stand 
high in the moral scale. It is an axiom in the law of 
nature and nations in Scotland, that " whate'er is 
Scotch is best." One is never allowed to forget this 
in Scotland or to remember it elsewhere. Scotch 
farming, Scotch land-letting, Scotch philosophy, law, 
divinity, morality, and education, are all of the best. 
Yet one may be allowed, out of Scotland,' to doubt if 
this superiority be supported by statistical facts. In 
1841, the population of Scotland, 2,620,000 persons, 
consumed 5,595,000 gallons of spirits. The popula- 
tion of England, 14,995,000 persons, or nearly six 
times the number of the Scotch population, consumed 
only 7,956,000 gallons of spirits, or about one-third 
more; and the Irish population, 8,175,000 persons, 
consumed only 5,200,000 gallons in the same year, 
being less than the consumption of the 2^ millions of 
the Scotch population. Unless whisky-drinking be a 
virtue north of the Tweed, it is difficult to make out 
the assumption of superior morality for the people of 
Scotland. If the traveller compare the indications of 
civilisation in the middle and lower classes of the 
English and Scotch, he will find himself obliged to 
confess that there is a deficiency north of the Tweed, 
especially among the female half of the community, 
on whom civilisation mainly depends, in those smaller 
usages, habits, and ways of living, which add to the 
comfort and well-being of common civilised life. 
There is a sluttishness about the womankind and all 
the women's work in a Scotch dwelling of the lower 
or even of the middle- class family, — a dirty con- 
tentedness of husband and wife with any discomfort or 



AND ENGLISH COMPAEED. 285 

nuisance of use and wont, — which stands remarkably 
in contrast with the order, regularity, tidiness, and 
cleaning, dusting, and scouring propensities of the 
housewives of the same classes in any English town 
or village. The Scotch people of the middle and 
lower classes may have more and better school in- 
struction, are more religious, and more intellectual 
in their religion, more frugal and prudent, except in 
the use of spirituous liquors ; bat the English of the 
same classes live in a more civilised way, are of more 
refined and civilised habits, are better brought up, 
although worse educated. Their manners towards 
each other, their habits of regard for others, and their 
self-respect, and the regularity, nicety, and spirit of 
order in their households which proceed from self- 
respect, are more cultivated. The English females 
of those classes are brought up in their little brick 
tenements to keep a cleaner and more cheerful house 
and a more regular housekeeping, on earnings as 
small as the means of the same class of labourers and 
tradesmen in Scotland. The table and table-cloth, 
the plate, and knife and fork, are laid out with decent 
regularity and cleanliness even in the poorest dwell- 
ing of the working man, should it only be to grace a 
dinner of bread and cheese. What a routing, and 
driving, and bawling, and scolding, all the morning, 
in a "sma' Scotch family that keeps but one bare- 
legged servant lassie," before things are got into any 
decent order! In England, in a small tradesman's 
or working man's family, you wonder how the house- 
work of the female, the sweeping, cleaning, bed- 
making, cooking, and such work, is done so quietly 
and so nicely, with only the wife's pair of hands. All 



286 HABITS, CHARACTER, CIVILISATION, 

is in order, as if the fairy folk had been helping all 
night with the scouring and rubbing. 

The English houses no doubt, the small brick tene- 
ments, are more handy, more convenient for saving 
work, and better provided with partitions within and 
yards and offices without, than the stone or turf-built 
Scotch cottage, all of one room under an unlined slate 
or straw roof, without divisions inside, or the most 
needful accommodation for a cleanly people outside. 
But the females themselves are more nice in their 
nature, more regular in their ways, better trained in 
doing things in their proper times, and putting things 
in their proper places, are better educated, in short, 
in their habits, than our Scotch females of the same 
class. One woman does the work of two in a house, 
when she can lay her hand on what she wants in an 
instant ; and the two have to seek half the day for 
what they were using the day before. But how comes 
it that the female half of the English people of the 
middle and lower ranks have this better education in 
habits of order, cleanliness, and civilised household 
life, than the much better school-taught people of the 
same classes in Scotland ? It seems to be, that edu- 
cation, in its ordinary meaning of the acquisition of 
knowledge, or of the powers and faculty of acqui- 
ring knowledge, has much less to do than we generally 
suppose in this age of the schoolmaster, with civilisa- 
tion in its true meaning of high social well-being 
arising from good government, free institutions, civil 
liberty, and in morals, manners, and household life, 
and in all public and private life, from a strong feel- 
ing in all classes of what is due to others as well as 
to ourselves. In these main requirements of true 
civilisation, the school-educated have no decided ad- 



OF THE SCOTCH AND ENGLISH. 287 

vantage over the world-educated ; over those who have 
acquired their knowledge, judgment, tastes, habits, by 
experience and their own reflection and their own 
common sense. The Scotch, French, and German 
people, with all the advantages of a much higher 
and more generally diffused school-education, are at 
any rate much less civilised, possess fewer of those 
requirements of a high social state, less of that refine- 
ment, order, and cleanliness, in the habits of domestic 
household life, which belong to material civilisation, 
than the more ignorant English. The reason may be 
that society in England never was so strictly feu- 
dalised as on the Continent and in Scotland. The 
classes of society have always borrowed more from each 
other, and do so at this day, than in other countries. 
The interests, tastes, habits, ways of living, and even 
sports and amusements, are more nearly alike in the 
higher and lower classes in England, and pass into 
each other more easily, from no feudal privileges or 
prerogatives keeping the classes distinct. The day- 
labourer chipping stones on the roadside, is as know- 
ing and eager as the squire of the parish, about the 
last fox-chase, or the next horse-race. All ranks, in 
town or village, are on tiptoe about the Derby and 
St. Leger. The English gentry also have in all 
times resided more on their estates, or in country 
houses and villages, than the Continental or Scotch ; 
and have been more addicted to field-sports, to hunt- 
ing, riding, horse-races, cricket-matches, and keeping 
horses, dogs, boats ; and such pastimes necessarily 
bring the lower classes, who administer to, and par- 
take in, those amusements, into daily intercourse and 
common habits and feelings with the higher. The 
clergy in England also, being generally connected 



288 CLANSHIP IN SCOTLAND — IN ENGLAND. 

with the families of the highest classes, bring with 
them into their parishes the social improvement of 
greater refinement of habits and ways of living, and of 
a diffusion through the social body of a higher stan- 
dard of, and common feeling for, nicety, cleanliness, 
and comfort. In Scotland nothing is of common in- 
terest to poor and rich. No object, no pursuit, no 
sport or diversion unites the two extreme orders of 
society; no tie, social, moral, or material, binds to- 
gether the gentry and the commonalty. The spirit 
of clanship has been extinct these threescore years, 
extinguished to its last spark by agricultural im- 
provement, sheep-farming, and land-letting. Highland 
lords and lairds may hire a few lads to represent the 
Highland clan in tartan before her Majesty, but it is 
only make-believe. The tie is gone, in Lowlands and 
Highlands, between the chieftain or landowner and the 
people on his property. The chieftain of the cotton- 
mill or iron foundry has, in these days, a greater 
" tail," commands a greater clan, can gather a greater 
" following," and wields a vastly greater power and 
amount of physical force in the country, than any 
duke, lord, or laird, between Dunrobin and Drumlan- 
rig. The Highland chiefs have improved away their 
clanships. It is in England in reality, not in Scot- 
land, that any thing like a spirit of clanship is to be 
found, if by clanship be meant the hereditary per- 
sonal attachment and mutual confidence between 
tenants and landlords. The English country gentle- 
men and their tenants are still holding together, in 
many counties, by a moral tie, by a mutual confidence 
in each other of fair honourable dealing, and by com- 
mon feelings, interests, and mutual attachment from 
old hereditary connection, as landlords and tenants. 



LANDLORD AND TENANT. 289 

This is the tie of clanship in its highest and most civi- 
lised form. In Scotland the tie has been broken before 
attaining this form. The laird, his factor, or his writer 
to the signet, takes the best offer of rent, even if the 
next best were from a tenant whose family had been 
for many generations on the land. The heartless cold 
link of a nineteen years' lease, is the only connection 
between landlord and tenant ; and has altogether 
superseded the moral or social tie of mutual reliance 
on honour, character, or sense of right. There is not, 
at this day, a tenant in Scotland, who would trust to 
his landlord's personal attachment, affection, honour, 
or sense of moral obligation between landlord and 
tenant, for holding his farm for a series of years at an 
old rent, without a written lease ; nor one who would 
trust to his landlord's spoken word for the putting 
up even of forty fathoms of stone dike — no, not if his 
landlord were a duke — without having every thing 
specified in legal deed or missive, signed, witnessed, 
registered, and in complete form belligerent for the 
Court of Session. This want of confidence between man 
and man, in any thing but legal compulsion by deeds, 
betokens no very high moral sense in those classes in 
Scotland, and no very close clannish connection of 
personal attachment and confidence. Landowners and 
their tenants stand in England, in their relations to 
each other, on a much higher moral footing. The 
turning out of old hereditary tenants, men of good 
character and conduct, avowedly for the penny more 
of rent, or even the raising of rents suddenly to the 
full value of the land, are rare events in a country- 
side in England, possessed by the old English gentry. 
Confidence, moral confidence, between man and man 
is the peculiar characteristic of the spirit of society in 

u 



290 THE MORAL TIE IN ENGLAND 

England. It is the lay religion of the English people, 
and a noble lay religion it is. The tenant sits from 
generation to generation, without writing or lease, 
never dreaming that his landlord will deny or disal- 
low any thing just, reasonable, or usual, with or with- 
out special legal covenant. This element of mutual 
reliance on good faith cements man and man, class 
and class, more closely together in the social struc- 
ture of England than in any other country ; and it is 
not confined to the classes of landlords and tenants. 
In all the common business of trade, even to the 
greatest amount, mutual reliance, not mutual distrust, 
is the rule ; and transactions in the ordinary affairs 
of life depend upon the good faith, the word, the cus- 
tom of the parties, much more than upon legal deeds 
and written contracts of fulfilment. It is to the 
honour of the country gentlemen of England, that the 
cases are very rare and exceptional, in which they do 
not respond to the confidence of their tenantry. This 
mutual confidence in, and dependence on, each other 
for what is right, fair, and reasonable between man 
and man, creates what it relies upon, nourishes the 
moral sense in all classes, and gives weight and in- 
fluence to public opinion on the right and wrong of 
the dealings, even of the highest individuals. Society 
rests on no such moral basis in any of the Continental 
countries, nor in Scotland, where feudalism, modi- 
fied a little by modern institutions and improvements, 
remains still the groundwork of law and social rela- 
tions between man and man. True it is, that the 
tenant is not so independent of the landlord, as with 
a lease. He may be turned out of his farm at a short 
notice ; he may be required to pay a higher rent ; his 
bargain is not legally so secure ; and he cannot lay 
out his capital in agricultural improvement under 



STEONGEE THAN IN SCOTLAND. 291 

this tenant-at-will system so freely as under a lease 
duly drawn out by a lawyer, duly stamped, and with 
all the stipulations and covenants binding on either 
party, regularly set forth. Yet we do see tenants in 
England, such is their reliance on the moral principle, 
laying out money, and largely too, in draining, ma- 
nuring, obtaining fine breeds of cattle and sheep, and 
in all the most expensive farm improvements ; and 
doing so as freely and confidently, under their no- 
tenure, as the Scotch tenant under his nineteen years' 
lease duly registered and in form of law complete. 
So imbued are these English farmers, paying even large 
sums in rent, with this spirit of confidence, and so 
seldom is it not responded to by their landlords, that 
they do not care in many districts for leases, do not 
want them, and trust to a higher law than the Court 
of Sessions — the moral obligation between landlord 
and tenant, and the moral force of public opinion. 

This closer, and morally juster, connection in Eng- 
land than in Scotland, between the different orders of 
the social body in their mutual relations, ways of 
thinking, ways of living, tastes, habits, manners, and 
ideas, appears unaccountable when we consider that 
in Scotland the actual schooling, the education of the 
different orders or ranks, the highest and the lowest, 
are much more upon a similar and equal footing than 
in England. Can it be that this very approximation, 
by which the individual of the lower class in Scotland 
may be, and very often is, the better-educated man, 
carries in it a principle of repulsion ? Whatever may 
be the cause, the English people are very much more 
aristocratic than the English aristocrac}'. They draw 
the line themselves between the different classes in the 
social body ; and it is the perpetual struggle of each 

u 2 



292 THE ENGLISH AN ARISTOCRATIC PEOPLE. 

class, and the great stimulus to industry, to be able 
to adopt tbe manners, usages, and ways and comforts 
in household life, of the class immediately above itself. 
The English people confer the social importance and 
conventional distinction, accorded voluntarily to the 
nobleman or gentleman in England. This seems to 
be the great distinction between the Continental and 
the English nobility and gentry. The former derive 
their importance and dignity solely from the sove- 
reign, and from the titles, decorations, and offices, 
bestowed by the court ; the latter derive their social 
importance from the people, and are supported by the 
people as a creation of their own. The classes are 
more closely connected together, and act upon each 
other more beneficially for society, than in the feudally 
constituted countries ; and England will probably be 
the last country in Europe in which nobility and 
gentry, or the aristocracy, will be abolished. It is a 
connecting peg holding together the social structure, 
and running through the whole of the institutions 
and life, public and private, of the English people. 
It has proved a false and unfortunate policy of the 
Continental sovereigns, to turn their aristocracy into 
a military or functionary class not connected with 
the people by ties of mutual services and good-will. 

It is difficult to estimate in a satisfactory way, the 
comparative condition of the lower classes in two 
different ages, or in two different countries in the 
same age. We can understand that the upper classes 
in every country, the wealthy and educated of the 
social body, are, in the present times, in a condition 
infinitely superior to that of their ancestors. The 
physical good and material well-being and gratifi- 
cations which commerce and manufactures have 



CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE EXAMINED. 293 

brought within their reach, the intellectual and moral 
improvement which education and literature have 
effected in the upper ranks of society since the be- 
ginning of the sixteenth century, the security of life 
and property, the majesty of law inviolable even in 
the most despotic states, the influence of public 
opinion on the most autocratic governments, and the 
recognition of some civil and political rights in the 
social body by the most self-willed rulers, are bless- 
ings enjoyed more largely by the upper classes in the 
present age, than in any preceding times. We can 
understand too, that in every country manufactures, 
commerce, professional employments, the spirit of 
modern society, its complicated affairs and various 
requirements, have opened up many new paths un- 
known before, by which men of industry and talents 
may ascend from the lower classes of the social body 
to the upper, and even to the highest. But still the 
question is not solved by these truisms — In what is 
the class of working men, living by their labour in the 
field or in the factory, better off than their fore- 
fathers, or than their fellow-labourers in the present 
times in other countries ? 

Before we can examine this question, we must ask 
another — What is being well off? What is it that con- 
stitutes the well-being of the working-man ? Is it 
plenty of food easily obtained ? Not exactly so, or the 
emancipated negro who lounges away half the week 
in ease and indolence, and obtains plenty of such food 
as he prefers by the ill-directed labour of the other 
half, would be in a state of more real well-being than 
the European labourer. The lazzaroni of Naples would 
have to be reckoned in a higher social condition than 
the artisans of London or Paris. Is it food, fuel, 

u 3 



294 IN WHAT CONSISTS THE WELL-BEING 

lodging, clothing, obtained by ordinary labour and 
industry in such abundance, that the industrious la- 
bourer earns a surplus, or is master of a surplus of 
his time and labour, to exchange for objects of his 
intellectual enjoyments ? This, perhaps, would come 
nearest to the type of a highest state of well-being of 
the labouring class of a community, if we give to the 
phrase " objects of intellectual enjoyments " its proper 
meaning and extension. Knowledge, religious and 
moral instruction, reading, writing, literature, all that 
schools and books, in short, impart to the human 
mind, do not exhaust what is properly comprehended 
under the term intellectual. Our cultivated and ac- 
quired tastes for material objects are in reality intel- 
lectual, although closely connected with, or even used 
only for, our physical enjoyments. They are in origin 
intellectual ; they spring from mind, and act on mind 
so powerfully, that they are in effect the most influ- 
ential agents of civilisation in modern society. What 
intellectual powers, what invention, talent, judgment, 
what activity of mind, are perpetually at work to 
gratify the cultivated acquired tastes of mankind in 
any civilised condition, for objects of mere physical 
enjoyment, objects which are even repugnant to our 
natural tastes ! The amount of intellect in the lite- 
rature of a country is trifling, compared to that 
exerted in pursuit of material objects. The tastes, for 
instance, for tea, sugar, coffee, tobacco, spirituous 
liquors, for comfort, luxury, finery in dress and fur- 
niture, together with thousands of similar tastes, are 
the mainsprings of almost all social action and civi- 
lisation, employ a vast amount of intellectual action, 
and are all cultivated and artificially formed tastes, 
and strictly speaking are intellectual tastes, not 



OF THE LABOURING CLASSES OF A COUNTRY? 295 

reared in the natural, but in the cultivated civilised, 
man. These acquired tastes are at once the test and 
stimulus of civilisation ; and compared to them, the 
purely intellectual influences of religion, morality, 
philosophy, or the purely physical influences of our 
animal wants of food, clothing, lodging, are ineflicient 
motives in modern society, to exertion, industry, ap- 
plication of mind and body — in short, to civilisation. 
If we compare these civilising tastes and the means 
to form and gratify them, of the common labouring 
man in England and on the Continent, the balance 
appears to be considerably in favour of our social 
state. Look into the dwelling of the English work- 
ing man, who is earning the average wages of labour 
in regular employment, and how many articles we 
see for comfort, cleanliness, and home use and enjoy- 
ment, which we miss in the dwelling of the German 
or French labourer ! We overlook them in England, 
because they are so common. We miss them abroad, 
because they are considered indispensable in the 
poorest English dwelling. The labouring man in 
England, although more ignorant, is more civilised 
by his tastes, habits, and wants, than the Continental 
man of the same station in life. His tastes, habits, 
and wants, are on a higher scale. His ignorance 
even is principally in matters without his own sphere 
of action ; but in matters within it, in all that regards 
hi3 own craft and business, he is more clever, acute, 
and knowing, than the much more highly educated 
man of the same trade abroad. If we approach the 
question nearer, and examine the means of gratifying 
the tastes and wants of civilised life, and the burdens 
which press upon those means in the social condition 

u 4 



296 CONDITION OF THE CONTINENTAL 

of the Continental and of the English working man, 
the balance of means, as well as of tastes for a state 
of well-being, appears considerably in favour of the 
latter. It is the common theme of foreign travellers 
who visit England, and of many superficial observers 
among ourselves, that the social state of the English 
nation is a monstrous junction of boundless wealth, 
extravagance, and luxury above, and of utter desti- 
tution, misery, and suffering below. They look only 
at the upper and lower strata of the social mass, and 
do not perceive that all between the two is densely 
filled up with incomes and earnings of every amount 
and every fractional difference, from the highest, the 
thousands or tens of thousands a year, down to zero. 
There is no vacuum in the mass between the top and 
the bottom, as in the social state of the Continent. 
A zero, a destitution, total and extreme at one end 
of the social chain, there must be in every country. 
In considering the proportionate well-being of the 
working class in different countries, the question is, — 
Where is this zero farthest removed ? where is the ten- 
dency to sink to it, or to rise above it, the strongest ? 
Now it is evident, that where the middle of the social 
body is most fully occupied with incomes of all de- 
grees, and where there is most capital and most ex- 
penditure in the most hands, there is most employment 
for the working man, and most tendency in his con- 
dition to rise above zero in the scale of earnings, 
income, and well-being. There is also, in the English 
social body, a peculiar feature, noticed in a former 
Note ; viz. that the expenditure of income by all 
classes is almost altogether on objects produced by 
common labour and handicraft work, not on objects 
of ornament and high taste, employing only the in- 



AND THE ENGLISH LABOURING MAN. 297 

dustry of a small number of superior workmen or 
artists. In estimating the condition of the lower 
classes, not only the amount of capital in the hands 
of the upper classes who employ them, but its dis- 
tribution, and the objects on which their income is 
usually expended, are essential elements. It makes 
an important difference in the well-being of the 
working-class man in every country, if the garden, 
the held, the stable, the house, and all within or 
around these, absorb the greater proportion of the 
income of his employers every year, and consequently 
afford him and his fellow-workmen abundance of 
common work in renewing, replacing, altering, and 
repairing, or if the greater part be absorbed in works 
of fine art, ornaments or trinkets of taste and value, 
in which common labour has little or no part or em- 
ployment. What we call a taste for comfort, is a 
taste very little developed on the Continent ; but it 
is of more social value by promoting the well-being 
of the many, than the higher tastes for the fine arts, 
as it turns almost entirely upon objects which ordi- 
nary skill and labour can supply. It is not talent, 
but ordinary skill and labour adapting objects to 
their uses in the most convenient way, that minister 
to the taste for comfort ; and this taste, so universally 
diffused through all classes of the social body in 
England, and so little diffused abroad even in the 
highest classes, gives to the common man innumer- 
able branches of employment and sources of earnings 
by common labour unknown tc the Continental la- 
bouring class and to their employers. But this sub- 
ject has been treated of in a former Note. 

These are only speculative considerations. What 
are the actual, visible, tangible points of difference 



298 PECULIAR BUEDENS ON THE 

in the condition of the Continental and the English 
working man? 

The Continental working man has, in the first and 
most grievous place, to serve three years, between the 
twentieth and twenty-fifth year of his age, as a pri- 
vate soldier in a regiment of the line ; and no substi- 
tute is allowed for this service, at least in Germany, 
which reckons 30 or 40 millions of people. The regi- 
ment may have its head-quarters far from his home 
and family. A young man from Prussian Poland on 
the Vistula, may have to join a regiment quartered at 
Aix-la-Chapelle on the west side of the Rhine. He 
must bring with him his own stock of clothes, viz. 
shirts, stockings, trousers, shoes, jacket, and cap, to 
last him the first year. How would an English joiner, 
blacksmith, shoemaker, or other tradesman, like to be 
marched off just about the time he had finished his 
apprenticeship, about the twentieth year of his age, to 
serve for three years in the 42nd or 20th, or any other 
regiment of the line ? What kind of workman would 
he be after three years' idleness and total disuse of his 
tools ? How would he like, after his three years' ser- 
vice in the line, to be enrolled in a militia regiment 
liable to be called out for service in or out of the 
country, at any time, and always called out, for six or 
eight weeks' drill and field manoeuvre every summer, 
to some distant encampment ? If the working man's 
time and labour be all his property and capital, and 
from twenty years of age to fifty years be the average 
working time, at full wages, in a workman's life, here 
is one tenth of this capital taken from him at once, in 
the three years' service in the line, besides his work- 
ing habits and expertness being deranged for the rest 
of his life by the long disuse of his trade. The eight 



CONTINENTAL WORKING MAN. 299 

weeks yearly of military service afterwards in the 
Landwehr take nearly one-sixth of his working time 
every year from him, to be expended in royal reviews 
and grand parades. If the English workman finds 
employment scanty in his own place, and thinks he 
may get steady work and better wages elsewhere, he 
sets out, and has only to consult his own judgment 
and his pocket about his removal. How would he 
like to have the soliciting for passports and for a 
transfer of his military service to some other Land- 
wehr district and regiment, and to undergo vexatious 
examinations, scrutinies, and loss of time, in order to 
get leave to remove and seek work ? He would pro- 
bably say, such a life is not that of a tradesman or 
working man, but of a soldier on leave, working at 
his original trade when he can. It is, in fact, a state 
of civil life which can only exist where the demand 
and supply of the products of the useful arts are stag- 
nant and inconsiderable, and where agriculture is in 
that low and dormant condition that, when the seed 
is in the ground, the agricultural labourers have a 
long period of idleness and leisure before harvest, 
which they can bestow, without inconvenience, on 
military service, if they draw pay and rations to sup- 
port them while so engaged. But in a country in 
which the people have risen above the servile state, 
and where improvements are going on, and supply in 
all the useful arts can scarcely keep up with the de- 
mand, this interruption of all useful reproductive la- 
bour for one-sixth of the year could not be tolerated. 
It would be worse, in its social effects, than all the 
interruptions from saints' days and church festivals 
of the Roman Catholic religion in the darkest a^es 
and most bigoted countries. In husbandry even, 



300 DIRECT TAXES CLASS TAX, TRADE TAX 

unless in its lowest and rudest state, it is in this in- 
terval between seed-time and harvest that all prospec- 
tive improvements must be carried on — draining, 
inclosing, ditching, building, road-making. It is a 
proof of a very backward condition of a country, that, 
when the " plough is cast," as the end of seed-time 
was termed in Scotland in former times, all field-labour 
is suspended until the hay-time and harvest. In such 
a social state, the working man, whether a tradesman 
or a common field-labourer, cannot be so well off as 
in Britain. The social arrangements are opposed to 
his well-being and thriving. 

But these taxes on his time and labour are not all 
the direct taxes which press upon the Continental 
working man. The Kopfsteuer, head-tax or poll-tax, 
on each individual of the working class, is a very op- 
pressive direct tax. The working people are divided, 
for taxation, into five or six classes ; each individual 
paying a poll-tax, higher or lower according to the 
class in which the tax-gatherer or assessor thinks 
proper to place him. In Hanover, for instance, the 
tax on the day-labourer of the lowest class is one 
dollar (equal to 4s. l\d.) per annum, payable by in- 
stalments monthly ; and in this class, fifteen days' 
wages, or about 6 per cent, of his average income, is 
fixed as the maximum of tax on any individual. The 
tax on the highest class of working people is five 
dollars (23s. l^d.) where in the lowest class it is one 
dollar. This is the system, with some variation in 
the classes and rates of tax in each class, on which 
the poll-tax or Kopfsteuer is levied in most parts of 
Germany. A trade-tax, or Gewerbsteuer, being a kind 
of income-tax on the supposed profits of the trades- 
man in every handicraft or branch of industry, and 



ON THE CONTINENTAL WORKING MAN. 301 

also a licence-tax to exercise the trade ; a journeyman- 
tax, levied on the class of journeymen according to 
their earnings ; a shop-tax, or licence to open a shop ; 
are direct taxes on the Continental working man un- 
known to the working man in our social state. In 
civil as well as in military arrangements, Prussia has 
been the model of almost all the other states of Ger- 
many. Her institution of the Landwehr shows the 
pressure of this semi-military state of society on civi- 
lisation and well-being, and her financial arrangements 
show the pressure upon the common man of her other 
direct taxes on the people. In Prussia, by a cabinet 
order of the 7th August, 1820, the taxes payable to 
the state were arranged and established under the 
following heads: — 1st, duties and consumption-taxes 
on foreign goods ; 2nd, the salt-tax ; 3rd, the stamp- 
tax ; 4th, the tax on trades ; 5th, the land-tax ; 6th, 
the taxes on home-made spirits, malt, home-made 
wines, tobacco-leaves of home growth ; 7th, the tax on 
meal and meat (Mahl and Schlacht Steuer ; literally 
grinding- and slaughtering-tax) ; and 8th, a class-tax, 
where the Mahl and Schlacht taxes are not levied. 
The land-tax was fixed by this edict at one-fifth of 
the clear annual produce of the land ; but the domain 
lands of the Crown, and those of the privileged nobles, 
are to pay one-sixth only. The taxable population, 
and the rates to be levied, are divided into four classes: 
1st, certain large cities, nine in number; 2nd, certain 
small towns, 132 in number; 3rd, all towns with 
more than 1500 inhabitants, and not included in the 
other two lists ; 4th, all other small towns, and the 
country. The class-tax is not levied in those places 
subject to the meal and meat-tax ; which exemption 
includes the 9 cities and 132 towns named in the 1st 



302 PEESSURE OF DIRECT TAXATION. 

and 2nd lists. The class-tax is levied by a division 
of the people into six classes. The 1st class pays 
monthly, for a whole household, four Thalers (about 
lis. dd. sterling) ; or, for a single person, two Thalers 
(about 55. 10^. sterling). The intermediate classes, 
between the highest and the lowest, pay proportionally 
less. The 5th class pays four Groschen (about h^d. 
sterling), for a whole household, per month; or two 
Groschen (about 1\d. sterling) for a single person ; 
and the 6th class, the lowest, pays one Groschen (about 
\\d. sterling) per month for each person ; but in this 
lowest class only three individuals in the same family 
can be charged with the tax. These personal taxes 
have to be paid within the first eight days of each 
month ; and execution on the property ensues on non- 
payment of the tax after three days' notice of arrear, 
and imprisonment also for the debt. The meal and 
meat-tax includes all corn or kinds of grain, beans, 
peas, &c. The 100 lb. of wheat pays six Groschen 
(about %\d. sterling), and of all other grain four Gro- 
schen (about 5^d. sterling) ; and no quantity under 
100 lb. can be ground. The meat- tax is one Thaler 
(about 2s. ll^d. sterling) for 1001b. of meat. The 
trade-tax (Gewerbsteuer) extends over all business, 
the making of any kind of goods for sale, all handi- 
crafts carried on with journeymen, the trades of mil- 
lers, carriers, skippers, innkeepers, provision dealers, 
lodging-house keepers, eating-house keepers, furnished 
room keepers, ale or spirit dealers. Bakers, brewers, 
and butchers, are rated particularly high, as the tax 
they pay falls almost as a direct tax on the public. 

We have no direct taxes in England affecting the 
labouring class, or reaching so low as the class-tax or 
poll-tax, or the trade-tax of the Continental states. 



DIRECT AND INDIRECT TAXES COMPARED. 303 

House-tax, window-tax, income-tax, property-tax, or 
assessed tax of any description, never come down to 
the labouring man with us, not even to the tradesman, 
artisan, or master or journeyman workman in good 
circumstances, and belonging rather to the lower 
ranks of the middle than to the lower class. His con- 
tributions to the public revenue, are taken from him 
altogether in heavy indirect taxes on what he con- 
sumes. His tea, tobacco, ale, spirits, and every article 
of luxury he uses, is taxed more or less exorbitantly ; 
but, since the abolition of the duty on foreign grain, 
few articles of prime necessity (soap perhaps is the only 
exception) come to him under a heavy tax. The in- 
direct taxes now levied are not of the nature of un- 
avoidable direct taxes by the indispensable nature of 
the articles they affect. A man escapes them just in 
proportion to his frugal, economical, sober habits. It 
is a recommendation of the mode of raising the re- 
venues of the state by indirect taxation, that it pro- 
motes those habits which are most valuable in society. 
The question of direct or indirect taxation is often 
agitated by our political economists ; but how the 
habits and well-being of our working population may 
be affected by the one or the other mode of raising 
the necessary revenues of the state, is seldom taken 
into consideration. The discussion generally turns 
upon the advantage to our commercial interests, if all 
the indirect taxes upon tea, wines, tobacco, and all 
other foreign articles, were abolished ; and if all excise 
duties on malt, paper, and such articles of consumption 
were suppressed ; and on the additional comfort and 
well-being which would be diffused by such a measure 
through the whole social body, and especially through 
the lower classes of it. Able political economists pro- 



304 INJUSTICE OF DIRECT TAXES. 

pose to abolish all our indirect taxes, and instead of 
them to substitute one direct properly graduated in- 
come-tax. Let us consider how such a measure would 
work in our social state. It would, no doubt, be very 
agreeable and comfortable to all ranks, to have our 
tea, tobacco, wines, spirits, malt liquors, and all the 
articles now so dear, brought down so low in price, 
that they would be within reach of all classes ; and to 
have timber, bricks, and all other building materials 
free of duty for our dwellings. It would unquestion- 
ably give a great stimulus both to our foreign and 
home trade. But to effect this change in the mode of 
raising the needful revenue of the state, the substitute 
for the indirect taxes, the direct income-tax or poll- 
tax, must extend downwards to the lower classes 
hitherto exempt from direct taxation. It must come 
as low as the three halfpence a month class in the 
Prussian poll or income-taxation, and with a much 
higher rate of tax on the common labouring man, if 
it is to be at all an equivalent for the deficiency in the 
national revenue, which would ensue by the repeal of 
the indirect taxes. Now, it would not only be very 
difficult and very expensive to collect such a direct 
tax from our free and movable working population of 
the lower classes, from whose numbers the equivalent 
for the indirect taxes must be made up — for it is evi- 
dent, from the small amount raised by the present 
income-tax, that it could only be made up by ex- 
tending the equivalent direct tax very strictly over 
the whole population — but this equivalent tax would 
be grossly unjust. It would be grossly unjust to 
make the working man who does not sip tea, smoke 
tobacco, drink spirits, ale, or wine, pay a tax to 
enable those who do, to buy cigars for a penny, tea 



DIRECT TAXATION UNJUST. 305 

for eighteen-pence a pound ; and ale, wine, and spirits 
at half their present prices. They who indulge in 
those luxuries or necessaries, may pay for them, and 
the state may raise or lower the duty on them, and 
make them dearer or cheaper to the consumers ; and 
it may even be a question of justice and policy, as 
between the state and the consumers, whether any 
duty, and what duty, should be levied on them : but 
there can be no question or doubt, that those who do 
not use them at all, should not be made to pay an 
equivalent tax, that others might have them duty free. 
This would not be natural justice, if it should be 
political economy justice. It is the peculiar character 
of our financial legislation, and, by favouring the ac- 
cumulation of small beginnings in every branch of 
industry, one great cause of our national wealth, 
thrift, and prosperity, that we have no tax on the 
time and labour of the working man for military duty, 
and no tax which he cannot, with frugality and 
economy in his habits and housekeeping, avoid al- 
together, and without prejudice to health of body or 
mind, or to his respectability and character ; and that 
when he does consume taxed articles, he pays tax 
only on what he consumes. Magna Charta is to the 
common man a trifle — a straw, compared to this great 
social right of paying taxes only for what he consumes. 
It is the main point of difference between the taxation 
of the subject of a free and of a despotic state — a 
citizen and a serf. The advantage of having tea, 
coffee, sugar, tobacco, spirits, and ale, which are the 
principal articles of indirect taxation that enter into 
the consumption of the working man, sold to him at 
one third of the present prices, would undoubtedly add 
gre*atly to the material comfort of his condition ; but 

x 



306 INJUSTICE AND OPPRESSION 

there are only two ways of obtaining this advantage 
— either by the total repudiation of the national debt, 
and the abolition of all the taxes it renders necessary, 
or by a conversion of those taxes into one direct tax 
reaching down, as in Prussia, to the earnings of the 
labouring man in the lowest class. With our indirect 
taxes, the man of this class can take his pipe of 
tobacco, or his dram, or let it alone, according to 
the pence he has in his pocket. He is a free agent in 
his liability to the tax, and is in a very different and 
much higher social position, than if he had the tax- 
gatherer coining to his door every month for a poll- 
tax on himself, his wife, and his children, with arrest 
and sale of his goods within three days if the tax is 
not paid, and imprisonment for any deficiency. The 
monthly collection of the class-tax in Prussia, Han- 
over, and all the German states, shows how oppressive 
it is on the lower classes, how much evasion of it is 
attempted, and what a host of small functionaries 
must be employed by the state to collect it, and 
prevent collusion or gross oppression. This class- tax 
creates the necessity of the passport system, and of 
the superintendence and interference of public func- 
tionaries in all private movement and business. In 
our direct income-tax, although coming down only to 
the upper ranks of our middle-class, and stopping 
there at a high rate of income compared to that of 
the working man, how much evasion takes place by 
removals, and the unsettled life of those subject to it 
endeavouring to avoid the tax-gatherer! It would 
require a total change in our social existence — it 
would require a passport system, in order to trace 
the defaulting tax-payer, and a functionary system, in 
order to assess the whole population into its proper 



OF DIRECT TAXATION. 307 

classes for taxation, to scrutinise the circumstances 
and earning of every individual, and to prevent 
fraud, and check injustice, oppression, or collusion. 
It would require, in short, the same military organi- 
sation of society as in Germany, to make such a direct 
taxation effective in England, and make the people 
submit to it. Where the population is dense and 
busy, the machinery, even in those military states, 
appears inadequate to the collection of a direct in- 
come-tax on the lower classes ; and in cities and towns 
of a certain population, the tax is commuted into a tax 
upon the corn and meat consumed by the inhabitants 
— a Mahl und Schlacht Steuer — and a heavy trade- 
tax on bakers and butchers to get at their customers. 
If England could be taxed in the same ratio to its 
taxable means as the Continent — as Prussia, for in- 
stance, or Hanover, or Wiirtemberg or Bavaria, if all 
land paid one fifth of its net produce, all traders, from 
the directors of the Bank of England to the cobbler 
in his stall, paid a Gewerbsteuer or trade-tax, and 
every handicraftsman, journeyman, or workman down 
to the common labourer inclusive, paid a class-tax or 
income-tax, and all in proportion to the tax on land, 
and if besides this direct taxation we had, as in 
all those Continental countries, an indirect taxation 
also, as heavy as the consumption of the articles 
could admit, on all foreign goods entered for home 
consumption, how long would it take to lighten the 
burden of the national debt? England has a greater 
reserve of taxable property to fall back upon, if any 
great social convulsion called for great exertion of 
the state to raise money, and has more taxable means, 
than any country in Europe. 

In his exemption from all direct taxation, in his 



308 CONDITION OF THE ENGLISH AND 

freedom from all compulsory military service, in his 
freedom to move from place to place to seek employ- 
ment where he pleases, and to engage in any trade or 
occupation he pleases, without restriction, superinten- 
dence, leave, or licence from any functionary, and 
without being accountable to any man for his doings, 
the English working man is in a higher social condi- 
tion than the Continental man of the same class. He 
is also in an easier position for working out his own 
prosperity and permanent well-being. The multipli- 
city of the branches of employment in our social 
state multiplies the means and opportunities of ad- 
vancement from a lower to a higher condition. On 
the Continent it is only by preferment in functionary 
employment, in the Church, and in literary occupa- 
tion as teachers or professors, that any advance can 
be made by a middle-class man. With us in every 
village and town how many instances Ave see of men 
rising by industry and good conduct, from very small 
beginnings, from a very low place in the social body, 
to such wealth, influence, and importance, that go- 
vernment employments or any situations the Church 
or the learned professions could offer, are inconsider- 
able objects in comparison ! We hear every day of 
common labourers becoming great manufacturers or 
opulent merchants ; and, if we look into society, we 
see, without hearing much about what is so common, 
tradesmen, dealers, operatives in every branch of in- 
dustry, who in our social system have worked them- 
selves up by character and conduct to independent 
circumstances and great well-being, from a very low 
position. This principle of progress from the lowest 
to the highest rank, is wanting in the Continental 
structure of society. The man even who has raised 



OF THE CONTINENTAL WORKING MAN. 309 

himself to wealth and extensive action as a merchant 
or manufacturer, must remain there, and does not 
meet his just reward in society. He has no social 
influence, no legislative weight ; an estate is but an 
investment for his money, as it brings with it none of 
those duties as a magistrate, or ties as a landlord, 
which connect together the landed proprietors and 
the people around them. Paid functionaries of the 
state discharge all those duties. The higher objects 
for which men strive — the social influence, the dis- 
tinction, the seat on the bench as a magistrate, or in 
parliament as a legislator — are wanting, in Continen- 
tal society, to the self-raised man ; and all the indus- 
trial classes up to the highest merchants, manufactur- 
ers, or bankers, are proportionally torpid ; the social 
influence and distinction in their circles of action 
which rightfully belong to their property, industry, 
and success being in the hands of a functionary class ; 
and men have no inducement to rise in the world, 
and make room for those behind them. 

One advantage, however, the Continental working 
man, who has gathered and saved a little money, has 
over the English working man. He can much more 
readily find a small piece of land suitable to his small 
means, in which he can invest his capital. The sale 
of national and Church domains in small lots, and the 
division of landed property generally over the Con- 
tinent, have given the working class the opportunity 
of acquiring small estates. To possess land seems to 
be a natural craving in the human constitution. How 
strong and general this desire is we saw lately, in 
the eagerness with which Mr. Fergus O'Connor's land 
scheme was taken up by the middle and working 
classes. Artisans, tradesmen, people of various occu- 

x 3 



310 CONDITION OF THE ENGLISH AND 

pations, who could not, without a great sacrifice, have 
betaken themselves to husbandry on a few acres of 
land, for a living — tailors, shoemakers, and such 
craftsmen, who can only earn a living in a town popu- 
lation or a crowded village — paid instalment after 
instalment to obtain a lot of land at last, by his land 
scheme. They were not aware, nor perhaps was Mr. 
O'Connor, of the legal difficulties and expenses which 
must render abortive any scheme of purchasing a 
large estate in England, and dividing it into lots to 
which good title-deeds could be given, and of making 
over the lots severally, clear of claims and encum- 
brances, to the subscribers, in succession as they paid 
up the value by instalments. Yet the scheme itself, 
in the abstract and apart from the conventional ob- 
stacles opposed to its fulfilment, is a good scheme, and 
one which government may some day find it sound 
policy to adopt or promote, in order to raise up in 
the country a more numerous class than we have now 
in our social body, interested by the possession of 
fixed property in the soil, in the preservation of peace 
and security, and in the defence of the proprietary 
rights in land. A yeomanry may be as necessary as 
a nobility or landed gentry, if it be true that there are 
bands of socialists, communists, or levellers abroad in 
the world, as our newspapers would have us believe, 
intent on having all property in common or di- 
vided anew. Land is the most insecure of all kinds 
of property in domestic commotions. It is visible, 
irremovable, and divisible ; and we have seen in the 
French revolution, that for one capitalist who lost his 
moveable property, a thousand landowners lost their 
estates. 

If we review all the burdens, taxes, and privations 



OF THE CONTINENTAL WORKING MAN. 311 

of the lower classes, or of the common man who has 
to live by his labour, on the Continent and in Eng- 
land — if we compare the state of religion, law, morals, 
civil rights, personal freedom, and of the amount of 
employment, and the prospects of rising from a lower 
to a higher condition, open alike in England to all 
classes, and compare the access to public opinion for 
the redress and exposure of individual grievances, 
the condition of the labouring class in England is 
certainly very superior to that of the same class on 
the Continent. The material advantages also are 
greater. The sea all around us is an element of em- 
ployment unknown even on the shores of the Con- 
tinent. What a large proportion of our working 
population is employed, indirectly and directly, in 
work connected with this element of life and industry ! 
Food, also, is better in England, fuel more abundant, 
clothing cheaper, the habits of living more wholesome, 
the constitution, or power of enduring fatigue, expo- 
sure, and hardship without injury, more exercised, 
and the bodily health and strength, in a given number 
of persons taken promiscuously from the population, 
seems greater than on the Continent. 



x 4 



312 BERLIN AND EDINBURGH. 



CHAP. XIII. 

NOTES ON THE INDICATIONS IN FOREIGN AND BRITISH TOWNS OF 
A READING PUBLIC. PRINTING AND BOOKSELLING ESTABLISH- 
MENTS IN BERLIN AND EDINBURGH. — NEWSPAPERS, PERIODICALS, 
SECTS, MEETING HOUSES INDICATE A HIGHER INTELLECTUAL 
CONDITION OF OUR POPULATION. — ON THE RHINE PROVINCES OF 

PRUSSIA. LANDWEHR AND CONSCRIPTION COMPARED. BETTER 

SATISFIED WITH THE FRENCH THAN THE PRUSSIAN GOVERN- 
MENT. DISJOINTED STATE OF THE PRUSSIAN KINGDOM THE 

PARTS INCAPABLE OF UNION INTO ONE NATION. THE UNION 

OF SCOTLAND WITH ENGLAND MISLED THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA 

IN THE PARTITION OF EUROPE IN 1816. ON MUNICH THE 

FINE ARTS— FRESCO PAINTING. INFLUENCE OF THE FINE ARTS 

ON CIVILISATION CONSIDERED. 

Berlin claims the distinction of being the metropolis 
of German literature. Here men of the highest talents 
and intellectual attainments, Humboldt, Tiek, Kanke, 
and many others of European celebrity, are congre- 
gated and pensioned. Here, too, swim shoals of the 
small fry of authors, who follow in the wake, and 
grow big upon the leavings, of the great leviathans of 
the mare magnum of German literature. The obscure 
traveller, gliding alone through the streets of Berlin, 
unknown and unknowing, cannot be expected to dive 
into its blue serene, and pick up pearls of anecdotes 
about the great unknown or known who have their 
being in its philosophic or poetic depths. He sees 
the surface, however ; and may estimate the extent of 
intellectual action in Berlin, compared with its extent 
in our great cities, by very homely, but not very in- 
conclusive, evidence. Take any ten streets, not inha- 



BERLIN AND EDINBURGH. 313 

bited by the very highest nor by the very lowest 
classes, in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester ; 
count, right and left, the booksellers' shops, huck- 
sters' book-stalls, shops with books in the window 
along with other rubbish, also circulating libraries, 
reading-rooms, tap-rooms with newspapers "taken 
in," stationers' shops, and all the social machinery, in 
short, which diffuses knowledge and is called into ex- 
istence by a reading public, and they will be found to 
exceed very greatly the same kind of establishments 
in any ten streets of Berlin. The difference struck 
me so much, in wandering as a stranger through 
Berlin, and buying a considerable number of books 
at an eminent bookseller's, that I endeavoured to 
get some statistical data on the subject. According 
to the official Beport of the Director of the Statistical 
Bureaux at Berlin, J. G. Hoffmann, there were, in 
1837 (when the last official Report was published), of 
booksellers, print-dealers, and music-dealers 83 shops 
only; of circulating libraries only 41; and of printing 
establishments only 38, with 180 presses. This was, 
in 1837, the literary machinery of Berlin, a city with 
a population, at that date, of 265,394 persons. Edin- 
burgh, including Leith, with a population of 166,450 
persons (not three fourths of the population of Berlin), 
gives employment to about 85 printing establishments; 
and booksellers, stationers, music dealers, printsellers, 
and such trades as may be classed under the rubric of 
Buck- Kunst- and Musikaiienhandlung, in Hoffman's 
Beport, amount to about 164, without including the 
many small shops selling second-hand books with other 
goods, and too humble to pay for their insertion in 
the Directory, it is not much that can be deduced 
from such statistical facts. They are too vague and 



314 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER OF THE 

variable. It is not too much to conclude, however, 
that if Edinburgh represents Scotland, and Berlin 
Prussia, the demand and supply of food for the mind 
must be considerably greater in the former, than in 
the latter country. Tf we look at the quality, also, of 
the food for the mind, supplied to the public appetite 
and taste, we must rank the intellectual character of 
the common reading people of Scotland and England 
very far above that of the Continental populations. 
Our newspapers, not only the daily London papers 
which can afford to employ the highest talents in their 
composition, but the ordinary provincial or country- 
town newspapers, published weekly or twice a-week, 
and to be found in every publichouse, well-frequented 
shop, and respectable family within a circuit of forty 
miles, are publications of a much higher literary cha- 
racter than any provincial newspapers on the Conti- 
nent, embrace a greater variety of subjects, treat them 
with more judgment, and show a more intelligent and 
higher cast of mind, both in the writers and readers, 
than can be inferred from any provincial Continental 
newspapers. When w r e look at the monthly shower of 
periodicals, tracts, serial publications, and pamphlets, 
falling like snow upon the people, and consider the vast 
circulation and high literary merit of such publica- 
tions as Blackwood's, Tait's, Fraser's, Chambers's, all 
supported by and circulating among the lowest, not 
the highest, classes of the reading public, and all in 
the hands of the working man, it is ridiculous to 
hear it gravely stated in speeches and pamphlets on 
national education that, among the people of England 
and Scotland, education and educational means are less 
generally diffused than among the people of Germany. 
If a stranger to Europe — an educated American, for 



BRITISH AND CONTINENTAL PUBLIC COMPARED. 315 

instance — were to travel over England and Germany, 
he would pronounce England to be the more educated 
and more reading country of the two, from the indi- 
cations of printing, stationery, books, pamphlets, news- 
papers, handbills, advertisements, notices, placards, all 
showing that reading and writing are necessaries of 
life, not merely amusements, among our lowest classes, 
and enter into their daily business in every station. 
Erom the great variety of sects and denominations of 
Christians, with their numberless chapels and meeting- 
houses, and the fine points of doctrine distinguishing 
them, which are not even very obvious to the uncul- 
tivated unexercised intellect, he would conclude that 
the middle class of our social body, who organise and 
maintain the vast body of intellectuality among them 
comprehended in their religious views, whether ortho- 
dox or not, must be a people of a very reflective turn 
of mind, and of great energy, perseverance, and zeal 
in carrying their principles out of theory into actu- 
ality. He would compare them with the torpid mass 
of the German people, who either passively receive 
and acquiesce, without inquiry, in whatever is laid 
down to them by their rulers in religion, politics, and 
social life, or who, like the Athenians in their decay, 
discuss, philosophise, refine, gossip, and expend their 
energy in disputation, but in action are incapable of 
self-government for common interests, or for promot- 
ing the principles they discuss and adopt. The events 
in Germany and France of the years 1848 and 1849 
give proof of the inferior education of the Continental 
people for practical life, and of the want of judgment 
and common sense even among the most educated 
men, in their grave attempts, in national assemblies 
at Paris, Berlin, Frankfort, Vienna, to frame for their 



316 THE PROVINCES ON THE RHINE, 

constituents a suitable constitution. The ludicrous 
schemes and speculations of these constituent assem- 
blies composed of educated men, prove that national 
education must be something else than reading and 
writing at government schools, under educational Ser- 
jeants. The true education of the mind of a people, 
the preparation to govern themselves and others, and 
to judge and act aright in their public and private 
affairs, is the training men receive in the complicated 
realities of business, in such a free active social state 
as that of Britain or of the United States. A people 
of amateurs, artists, authors, performers in literature, 
music, painting, theatrical representation, and the fine 
arts, have not attained so true an education in the 
autocratic and semi-feudal states of the Continent, as 
the people of common sense and ordinary intellect 
have attained in the free social state of England and 
America. 

The provinces on the Rhine, which were annexed 
to Prussia by the congress of Vienna, have a country 
population of about a million and a half,, besides the 
considerable cities, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Treves, 
Coblentz, Bonn, on the left side of the Rhine. This 
territory had been incorporated with the French em- 
pire under Napoleon. The country on the opposite 
side of the Rhine, with the important manufacturing 
towns, Dusseldorf, Elberfeld, and others, belonged to 
the kingdom of Westphalia, and had also been under 
the French laws. The people are Roman Catholic; 
and in manufactures, trade, capital, and industry, are 
very far in advance of any other portion or people of 
the Prussian dominions. The Code Napoleon, the 
trial by jury, the open courts of justice, were much 
more popular with them than the Prussian laws and 



UNDER THE FRENCH AND THE PRUSSIAN RULE. 317 

institutions, and the French military conscription 
was considered much less burdensome and oppressive 
than the Prussian landwehr service. Napoleon's go- 
vernment had, in fact, produced much good along 
with its evil, in the social condition of those provinces 
which had been incorporated in the French empire, 
or placed under French law and government. The 
husbandman had been freed from tithes and feudal 
burdens or servitudes. The dismemberment and 
sale in small portions, of the Church and state do- 
mains, had placed many little estates in the hands of 
people who had only been feudal tenants before ; and 
the agriculture of these provinces had unquestionably 
made great progress under the French government. 
The swarms of begging monks who formerly wan- 
dered over the country, living upon the superstition 
of the people, had been entirely extirpated, and with 
them a great deal of the superstition by which they 
lived. Perfect freedom of religious belief was esta- 
blished. The rich livings in the Church being re- 
duced in wealth, were no longer an object for the 
nobles or upper classes, and the sons of peasants 
filled the vacancies, and were a clergy devoted to 
the government of Napoleon, and who, in this most 
bigoted country in the North of Europe, quietly per- 
formed their clerical duties without regard to Rome 
or the denunciations or authority of the pope. The 
prelates, abbots, and canons, who had formerly lived 
upon the fat of the land, had emigrated or died out, 
and were replaced by a poorer working-clergy, drawn 
from a lower class. Trade and manufactures flou- 
rished in these provinces, under Napoleon's Conti- 
nental system of the exclusion of all English products. 
It was, in fact, the foundation of their prosperity, 



318 CONSCRIPTION AND LANDWEHR 

and the leading example, it had succeeded so well, of 
the similar exclusion by the German Customs' League, 
for the same purpose of securing a home market for 
the manufactures of this quarter, which their quality 
and price would not obtain in a free competition with 
British manufactures. The conscription was unques- 
tionably a very grievous burden ; but it was consi- 
dered a more tolerable evil in a manufacturing country 
than the vexatious yearly-returning landwehr ser- 
vice. The conscript was taken away once for all, as 
if he had been swept off by cholera. His civil career 
was at an end, and his place was supplied. But the 
landwehr man is taken away every year, and for the 
most useless service in time of peace when there 
are no hands to spare, as in a time of war, in a ma- 
nufacturing population in full work. The Rhine pro- 
vinces have had ample experience, both of the con- 
scription system under Napoleon, and of the landwehr 
system since their annexation to Prussia. We are 
so accustomed to hear the French conscription de- 
nounced as the most tyrannical, oppressive, and un- 
popular measure ever resorted to in modern times, 
for raising or recruiting an army, that we are amazed 
to find in a statistical account of the Rhine provinces, 
published at Cologne, that the people of these pro- 
vinces, after an experience of both, of the conscription 
and of the landwehr system in succession, prefer the 
conscription as the less burdensome of the two. 
They are competent judges certainly; for they, and 
some millions more of the people of the Continent, 
have had the infliction of the two, one after the other. 
The Landwehr, they complain, takes every man from 
his business for three entire years, and then every 
year afterwards for an uncertain period of from six 



IN THE KHINE PKOVINCES. 319 

weeks to two months. It unsettles and deranges 
every man engaged in manufacturing business, and 
is suited only to an agricultural population, and only 
in that low dormant state that, when the seed is 
sown, there is a long period of idleness until the 
crops are ripe, and no work is carried on that can 
prevent the peasant from giving a few weeks to mili- 
tary service. But this state of husbandry is found 
only in the eastern provinces of Prussia, and not in 
the provinces on the Khine, in which the small estates 
are farmed as in Flanders and Belgium, and the large 
on the most approved principles of agriculture. The 
conscription took by ballot a certain number of the 
young men each year, who had attained the military 
age and had not yet served. When the quota was 
complete, those who had not been drawn were free, 
and those who had been drawn might, in ordinary 
times, escape from personal service by finding a remyla- 
cent or substitute. The conscription was, in fact, our 
own militia ballot, only recurring more frequently and 
stringently ; but in its worst form it is a much less 
oppressive burden than the landwehr service, which 
takes every man, without any substitute, for three 
years together, and then for several weeks yearly as 
long as he lives. By this statistical account it ap- 
pears that, from exact information and calculation, 
three conscripts only, on an average, in towns of a po- 
pulation of 1200 souls, had actually been obliged to 
march, and only one, in villages of 400 inhabitants. 
The rich or busy, who could not leave their social 
position or trades without ruinous consequences to 
themselves and others, were allowed by law to find 
a substitute, and could always do so for a price about 
equal to what was generally given in England during 



320 CONSCRIPTION AND LANDWEHR 

the war for a substitute for the militia, about thirty or 
forty pounds sterling. This money fell generally into 
the hands of the family of the substitute-recruit, and 
was very useful to the peasantry in particular, by 
giving them a little capital to lay out in the purchase 
of a lot of land, and relieved them also from the 
maintenance of one of the family whose labour was 
not required at home. The parents very often saw 
their sons rising step by step to considerable, and 
even high, military rank and emolument. The young 
men in general, were eager to engage in a military 
life, in which so many of their own class were ad- 
vancing to high situations from the same begin- 
ning. The balance of pay due to those who died in 
the service, and the pensions of those maimed, were 
always, even in the times of the greatest financial 
distress in France, remitted punctually and faithfully 
to the relatives or parties at home, and brought no 
inconsiderable sum annually into circulation among 
the peasantry of the Rhine provinces. The conscrip- 
tion was by no means so much detested by the people 
of these provinces, as the subsequent landwehr system 
of their Prussian masters, and is in reality a mild 
and civilised system compared to it. The spirit of 
military distinction and of honour belonging to the 
military profession, is strong in the conscript, even 
when he is dragged unwillingly into the service. He 
is of a distinct and distinguished profession. But 
all are of this profession in the landwehr system. 
It is no distinction at all to be a soldier, where all 
men are from necessity soldiers. In France, and in 
the Rhenish provinces when part of France, this 
feeling of professional superiority over men in civil 
occupations sweetened the lot of the conscript, and 



RHINE PROVINCES OP PRUSSIA. 321 

was a kind of social recompense paid to him. In the 
landwehr system this distinction and feeling are 
lost, all people being equally military, and having 
served, day for day, the same time, in the same routine 
of duty and with the same feeling of discontent. 

The Prussian provinces on the Ehine are in spirit 
much more allied to France than to the Prussian 
provinces on the Elbe, the Oder, the Warte, or the 
Pregel. The latter suffered as conquered provinces, 
under the despotism of Napoleon, from 1806 to 1813. 
They existed only to pay contributions and support 
French troops. The former were a part, and even 
a cherished part, of the French empire itself. The 
despotic rule of the chief affected but a few indi- 
viduals, of a particular class, in the departments. 
The burdens were the same, and the laws the same 
for all ranks and classes. The restrictions on the 
liberty of the press were no intolerable grievance to 
a population too ignorant, or to busy, to bestow 
much time on reading ; and the restrictions on the 
importation of English goods gave an impulse to 
the manufactures and trade of those provinces, 
unknown to them before or since. To the people 
of those provinces their annexation to Prussia was 
a positive evil. The best markets for the products 
of their industry were in France. They had the 
laws of France, the Code Napoleon, to which they 
cling with the more attachment, because they are 
more cheaply administered, and more simple in the 
procedure, than the Prussian semi-feudal law. They 
have the character and feelings of a French, or of 
a French and Belgian population, not of a German. 
Their petitions, or rather reclamations, in 1818, for the 
performance of the promises of a constitution, show 

Y 



322 DISJOINTED STATE OF THE 

much more of the determination to obtain their 
rights, than of German loyalty, patience, and implicit 
confidence in the sovereign. These provinces are 
the Yorkshire and Lancashire of the present Prussia, 
and are bound by no hereditary ties to the Prussian 
government, and by no present benefits. The cities 
of Cologne, Coblentz, Treves, and the town of Cleves 
made very distinct demands, in April, 1818, and 
direct to the sovereign, for a representation of the 
people in a constitutional Government — equality of 
taxation, without any exemptions of persons or classes 
— equality of all the subjects in the courts of law — 
the retention of the open courts of justice and oral 
testimony, of the trial by jury and the independence 
of the judges, as established by the Code Napoleon — 
and the abolition of all the feudal courts and pro- 
cedures. These demands show that the people are 
in a very different social state and mood from the 
ignorant inert population of the eastern provinces 
of this kingdom, or from the easy submissive Germans 
about Berlin, or Breslau. In Silesia even, which had 
been above fifty years under the Prussian sceptre, 
the petitions for a constitution according to the royal 
promise solemnly given in 1813, are more energetic 
than polite. " If war were to arise," it is said in one 
of those petitions, " it would then be too late to grant 
a constitution." 

The different provinces of which the present 
kingdom of Prussia was patched together by the 
Vienna congress, are too distinct, in social condition 
and character and in their material interests, to be 
amalgamated into one nation imbued with a common 
spirit. The length of this kingdom from the Kussian 
frontier to the French, or from Memel to Saarbruck, 
cannot be less than 1200 miles in a straight line; 



KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA. 323 

and taking its breadth from the northern point of 
the isle of Kugen to Plesse in Upper Saxony, it 
will be about 600 miles. The kingdom has been 
compared to a wasp in shape. A body of two parts 
is connected together by a slender ligament. The 
eastern part contains about seven and a half millions, 
and the western about. three and a half millions of 
inhabitants. No mutual wants connect together the 
provinces of this oddly shaped kingdom, no trade 
with each other, no common interests or objects. 
The intercourse between the people on the Baltic 
and the people on the Elbe and Ehine, must be less 
than between any two provinces belonging to the 
same sovereign in any kingdom in Europe. Each 
group produces the same articles for its own sub- 
sistence, and requires no importation of such articles 
from any other group; or if a supply were required, 
the distance, and land carriage, and bulk of the 
raw articles of agricultural produce which might be 
wanted, preclude the interchange between them of in- 
dustry for industry. People so separated by distance 
and by the total absence of any want of each other 
under any circumstances, may be placed under one 
government or monarch, by the fiat of a congress 
or the will of a conqueror, and called one people 
inofficial papers; but they never can be amalgamated 
into one nation. They will remain as distinct as 
Englishmen and Hindoos. This want of unity in 
interests, character, and social condition among the 
shreds torn from other nationalities (which the con- 
gress of Vienna and the hereditary greed of territory 
that has always distinguished the Hohenzolleren 
monarchs, have annexed to the Prussian dominion), 

will always prevent the people of this kingdom from 

r 2 



324 PEUSSIA OR GERMANY CANNOT 

being a nation. It will only be a political kingdom held 
together by treaties and military autocratic govern- 
ment ; but will never be a natural kingdom, of which 
the subjects are nationalised and held together by 
common interests and feelings. This, perhaps, is the 
most valid excuse that can be given for the delay of 
the late, and the present king, in fulfilling the promise 
given to the people, in 1813, of a constitutional 
government. It is but too true, that if the people 
under the dominion of Prussia had a representative 
legislature, the character, feelings, and material in- 
terests of the different provinces and classes of this 
kingdom of patchwork are so different, that it could 
not work beneficially for all. It would always be 
producing a one-sided partial legislation. The en- 
actments useful, or even necessary for provinces on 
the Baltic, would be onerous, or even grossly op- 
pressive, for provinces in the interior of Germany. 
One enactment could not be applied to all, consistently 
with justice and good government. This observa- 
tion is still more applicable to all Germany, if the 
proposed union of all of German race and language 
could be carried into effect according to the visions 
of the German philosophers and writers. The very 
ideas, wants, and language of the representatives 
from these Rhenish provinces, would be unintelligible 
to those of Pomerania, Brandenburgh, or of the pro- 
vinces on the Vistula. The upper classes alone have 
a common civilisation, and a common language in 
the cultivated German. The middle and lower classes 
stand in a different stage of civilisation ; and, as 
may be supposed in so large a space of country, 
and with such restrictions on their moving from 
place to place, have a patois in each province, a 



BE NATIONALISED. 325 

dialect of the Piatt Deutscli, unintelligible to those 
of the same class in the other provinces, and have 
a difference of essential interests still greater than 
the difference of language. The people are not ac- 
customed to self-action, even in their own affairs as 
individuals, and are not ripe for taking a part in 
the legislation of a whole country. The educated 
upper classes, again, are quite as little prepared to 
become practical legislators — it is not a part, but 
a dominance of his own in legislation, that each 
individual of these classes claims for his own ideas 
and theories. France and Germany are like potato- 
beds under the recent disease ; the roots not advanced 
to maturity, and the stems and leaves over ripe, 
falling off, and withering in a premature vegetation. 

The union of Scotland with England in the begin- 
ning of the last century, has, in the present, been the 
cause of great social and political evil on the Continent 
of Europe. It has proved so successful and complete 
for all purposes of the state, that the great- powers, 
and their Metterniches and Castlereaghs, at the set- 
tlement of Europe in the congress of Vienna of 1815, 
1816, considered it an example, and a justification of 
all annexations of one country to another, however 
discordant in feelings or interests ; and a proof that, 
in a few generations, in a century or so, differences 
will vanish — feelings, prejudices, and interests will be 
amalgamated, and two distinct nations will become 
one. They did not consider what were the circum- 
stances and steps by which the Scotch and English 
became assimilated in national spirit to all the extent 
that is required for the purposes of British govern- 
ment ; and to what extent they remain still distinct 
in character, mind, and social action, and never can 

Y 3 



326 THE UNION OF SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND 

be assimilated, or made one people, to the extent re- 
quired by the Continental autocratic governments. 
No two nations, originally distinct and hostile, ever 
were so closely bound together by common feelings 
and interests, by mutual intercourse and business, as 
the Scotch and English ; yet they are, at this day, 
two as distinct peoples as ever cut each other's throats 
without knowing why — distinct in way of think- 
ing, way of living, character, manners, religion, laws, 
language, and social institutions. It is precisely by 
leaving those inextinguishable differences untouched, 
and without any attempt to assimilate them in the 
two countries, and by merely knotting together into 
one uninterrupted line, the actual material interests 
of the two, that the union of Scotland and England 
has been made so essentially complete and happy for 
both. It is precisely by the very opposite policy, by 
meddling with, and trying to assimilate every thing, 
even things the least essential to good government 
and the most distant from the legitimate subjects of 
legislation — such as the language of the country in 
Belgium ; the Lutheran and Calvanistic Churches, and 
the education of the people in Prussia ; the liberty of 
thought, speech, and action in Lombardy — that the 
annexations decreed by the congress of Vienna in 
1815, have been broken up; and, in 1848, scarcely a 
fragment of the European system then established 
remains in union with any other fragment, unless 
under the grasp of military power. The European 
sovereigns, in the pride of victory, dealt with human 
nature in their partitions and annexations at the con- 
gress of 1815, as if man were but a puppet created 
to march, present arms, pay taxes, and obey. The 
example of Scotland appeared to justify all arrange- 



MISLED THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA. 327 

ments of territory which suited the sovereigns them- 
selves, without any consideration for the wishes or 
interests of the people. 

At the period of the union of Scotland and England, 
many circumstances combined to unite the material 
interests of the two nations. Commerce, manufac- 
tures, and the colonies were beginning to prosper, and 
to create a demand in England for a kind of labour 
which Scotland could supply, and which England, 
owing to her different social institutions, could not. 
As workmen the English were, and still are, very 
superior to the Scotch ; but as educated workmen, 
who could read, write, keep some kind of account, and 
oversee and conduct with steadiness, sobriety, and 
intelligence what was entrusted to them, the Scotch 
were, and still are, superior to the English labourers. 
They had the advantage of a useful education in their 
parish schools ; and from the religious controversies 
in which the preceding generation, even in the lowest 
ranks, had taken a part and interest, some kind of 
mental power, acuteness, self-respect, or pride in con- 
duct, had been awakened among them. In England 
the Scotch labourers very generally filled in civil 
society what Serjeants and corporals do in a military 
body; viz. those offices in which head as well as hand 
is needed : and even to this day the situations of chief 
gardeners, warehouse-porters, and such places, in 
which reading, writing, intelligence, and educated 
habits of sobriety and regularity are required, as well 
as manual labour, are generally filled by Scotchmen. 
The demand for educated labour raised the common 
Scotch labourer to a high attainment and character in 
his rank of life. The union of Ireland came too late 
to raise the Irish people in the same way, even if they 

Y 4 



328 THE WANT OF PRINCIPLE IN THE 

had enjoyed the previous education at home of the 
Scotch. The market for educated labour was pre- 
occupied. Cheap manual labour, not a higher de- 
scription of labour, was all that Ireland had to send 
to England ; and that was not required in England, 
and could neither improve the condition of the English, 
nor the character of the Irish, labourer. The Scotch 
came with a kind of labour more valuable, more scarce, 
and better paid, and which, depending upon conduct, 
sobriety, intelligence, and education, raised the lower 
and middle classes of the Scotch people to a higher 
condition than they were in before, and united them 
by their material interests to England. 

In the annexations made by the Vienna congress, 
especially those to the Prussian dominions, no regard 
was paid to the material interests, or to the laws, 
rights, feelings, or prejudices of the people separated 
from other sovereignties and annexed to Prussia. The 
provinces torn from Saxony, Sweden, or from inde- 
pendent existence as small states of the German 
empire, were parcelled out, apparently by a stroke of 
the pencil on the map. The union of Scotland with 
England was considered proof conclusive that, in a 
generation or two, all discrepancies would disappear. 
They would so, if the natural material interests of the 
parts had been the same, and had been amalgamated 
by free intercourse and mutual affairs. But misgo- 
vernment in its worst form, that of over-governing — 
of mixing government in all things, however little- 
connected with the stability of the state or the legiti- 
mate objects of legislation, and of centralising and 
reducing to a common form (for the sake of giving 
employment and subsistence to a functionary class) 
the social affairs of people with local interests and 



ARRANGEMENTS OF THE CONGRESS OF 1815. 329 

under natural circumstances totally different, and 
often opposed to each other — has produced the very 
reverse. The Pole on the Vistula, and the West- 
phalian on the Rhine, are Prussian only in name. 
They have no common interests or objects uniting 
them into one nation, no mutual intercourse or inter- 
change of industry for industry ; as little have the 
Swedish subjects of Pomerania on the Baltic, with the 
subjects of Saxony in the centre of Germany — all 
annexed equally to Prussia by the Vienna congress. 
The provinces beyond the Rhine are French in cha- 
racter, laws, manners, language, and in material in- 
terests. Such nationalities cannot be extinguished 
by the protocol of a congress. Prussia is but a king- 
dom on paper, on the map ; but not in the mind of 
the people. It is a kingdom, but not a nation. The 
movement throughout Germany of 1848, has proved 
that the settlement of Europe in 1815 by the Vienna 
congress, has been but an arbitrary and temporary 
partition of the Continent among the allied sovereigns, 
based on no principle, regardless of the differences 
of material interests, natural circumstances, character, 
spirit, temperament, and peculiar idiosyncrasy which 
divide nation from nation, and of which the parts 
cannot be held together under one common law and 
government, unless by military autocratic despotism. 
This cannot be a permanent settlement of the Conti- 
nent of Europe in our civilised times. We are enter- 
ing upon an age of anarchy, transmitted to us by the 
thoughtless autocratic congress of Vienna, in which 
the sovereigns looked only to the increase of their own 
territories and the defence of their power from French 
invasion, not to the circumstances of the European 
people. 



330 MUNICH. — THE FINE ARTS 

Munich is the Athens of Germany, nay, of Europe 
— the European academy of taste in the fine arts, and 
consequently of all human civilisation. So they tell 
you here in Munich, and the opinion is adopted very 
generally. The Bavarian ex-monarch declared some 
years ago, on laying the foundation stone of a second 
Pinacotheque, or picture gallery, " that he lived but for 
his artists ;" and all Germany re-echoed with applauses 
of the foolish saying. Two or three snug little ques- 
tions, each of which might be stretched out into a 
volume, suggest themselves. Eirst, Is it true that 
Munich-taste is the best and purest of all tastes, past, 
present, or to come, in painting, architecture, and the 
other fine arts? Secondly, Is it true that civilisation 
is measured most correctly by the state of the fine 
arts in a country ? and that the civilisation of the fine 
arts, of the esthetic, is of a higher nature and more 
connected with the social, moral, and religious well- 
being of a people, than the civilisation diffused by the 
culture and enjoyment of the useful arts ? Thirdly, 
Is it true that kings should live for their artists only ? 
should tax their subjects to the utmost, in order to 
erect masterpieces of architecture, very beautiful and 
very useless ? should lavish the means of the country 
in gilding, stucco, statuary, fresco paintings, and such 
unreproductive objects? I shall spare my readers, and 
merely give my impressions at Munich, without pre- 
tending to discuss the inquiries they suggest. 

The city stands upon a vast plain of very sterile land. 
It is to art, not to nature, that it is indebted for any 
beauty or amenity. In the distant horizon, in clear 
weather, the hills of the Tyrol are distinguishable: 
but distant mountains, however lofty — Mont Blanc 
itself, from the Lake of Geneva — may be very small 



COUNTRY AROUND MUNICH. 331 

and unimpressive on the horizon, as the spectator's eye 
only measures their altitude by the very inconsider- 
able portion of the arc from the zenith to the horizon 
that they fill up. The river Iser rushes through the 
plain and the city in several branch streams, running 
with such velocity of current that you look around 
you for their mountain origin ; and when you see no 
high ground near, and no sensible declivity of the 
plain, you are at once struck with the truth, that those 
distant mountains on the horizon must be of great 
height to throw down their waters with such force at 
such a distance. The Iser, coursing across the plain 
with the strength and swiftness of a mountain stream, 
would be a beautiful feature, but that its water is of a 
milky, greenish, or soap-suddy hue ; the banks low, 
muddy, and canal-like ; the country around flat, mea- 
gre in vegetation, and unpicturesque. It is to objects 
of art alone that the eye of the traveller turns. Nature 
has few charms in the vicinity of Munich, although an 
extensive piece of ground at one end of the town, has 
been Rumfordized into an English park, by the same 
ingenious gentleman of the last generation, to whom 
the world is indebted for never-smoking fire-places, 
cheap soup, and other draughts upon posterity for 
undying fame. The eye is sated at Munich with pa- 
laces, public buildings, museums, galleries of pictures 
and of statuary works, collections of antiquities, curi- 
osities, and nic-nacs of all kinds and degrees of merit, 
from dressed dolls, representing Indian faquirs and 
Chinese mandarins, to the Venus and Graces of Canova, 
and the Greek sculptures from iEgina. Is this the 
Athens, or the curiosity-shop of Europe ? Is this the 
school of all that should be adopted, or of all that 
should be avoided, in the fine arts ? These questions 



332 MUNICH THE ISEE GATE. 

are alternately uppermost in the traveller's mind, as 
he takes a first rapid view of the objects of fine art at 
Munich. 

On the evening of my arrival, I set out from the 
inn — the Guldene ffahn, or Golden Cock, a middling, 
old-fashioned, German inn — and strolled about the 
town, to explore its streets without the annoyance of 
a valet de place at my elbow. Passing the Main 
Guard — always the first public establishment that 
catches the eye in foreign towns, and the last in ours 
— I came to a celebrated object, the Iser Gate. It is 
one of the oldest of the modern embellishments of 
Munich ; one of the first in which fresco painting was 
adopted, and its exposure to the atmosphere in Ba- 
varia fairly tried. It cannot be said that the plaster 
has suffered, or that the colours have materially faded, 
during an exposure of about fifty years to the heat 
and cold, damp and drought, of a climate very vari- 
able, or rather, exceedingly given to extremes. The 
durability of the art, or of its means — plaster and 
colour — in out-of-door works, seems sufficiently esta- 
blished by this experiment. It is charitable to sup- 
pose that to try the experiment was all the builder 
intended, and it is not fair to criticise the work in any 
other view. This building, however, being held out 
to the traveller as a distinguished object of fine art, 
independently of the successful proof it gives of the 
durability of fresco painting in our rough climates 
north of the Alps, the traveller may state the impres- 
sion it makes on him. The Iser Gate is placed with- 
out any meaning : it corresponds to nothing, joins no- 
thing, keeps nothing in and nothing out, but is simply 
a gate-by-itself gate, which seems to have dropped 
from the moon into an open space in a street of Mu- 



MUNICH. THE ISER GATE. 333 

nich, to be decorated with fresco paintings. In this 
pure simplicity of want of purpose, this nothing-to- 
do-ishness where it stands, the Iser Gate might have 
vied with the similar structure at Hyde Park Corner, 
before the Duke and his horse took pity on it and gave 
it something to support. The Iser Gate is flanked 
on each side by two rotundities, more corpulent and 
dwarfish in their dimensions than beseemeth genuine 
gothic towers, and in shape resembling more the two 
Heidelberg tuns set on end than any other mediaeval 
structures. Round the heads of these towers, below 
their mock battlements, runs a fillet of gaudily painted 
escutcheons, or shields, of red and white, green and 
blue, in brilliant quarterings ; and very splendid they 
are in colours. But what are they intended for? 
Whether the gate is to be taken for a Roman trium- 
phal arch, or for a Gothic castle-gate, or both in one, 
the men on the battlements would scarcely hang their 
shields out of their own reach, and where they could 
not get at them either from above or from below. 
But ornamental effect is probably all that was in- 
tended. The effect is similar, but on a great scale, to 
that of the fillet of gilt paper usually bound round the 
end of a dumpy web of broadcloth in a draper's shop. 
Above the arch or gateway itself is a long fillet, about 
eight feet broad, and some seventy feet in length, 
teeming with allegory and history in fresco. The 
figures are very spirited sketches, in bright colours, 
by Neher and Kogel. Is it from ignorant prejudice, 
or is it from a just dislike to the incongruity of mix- 
ing painting with architecture to produce one archi- 
tectural effect, that this fillet of painting is not satis- 
factory to ever}^ taste ? The Elgin marbles in their 
native position and state, a frieze or fillet of stone- 



334 INCONGRUOUS MIXTURE OF 

work forming one ornamental portion of a stone tem- 
ple, are in unity of effect with the building, and are 
a part of it ; but the very same figures and subjects 
painted on a stripe of canvas, or on stained paper- 
hangings, or on a stripe of plaster in fresco paintings, 
and hung up or stuck up where the sculptures had 
been, would to every eye be a monstrous incongruity. 
No merit in the painting, no spirit in the sketch or 
splendour in the colours, could quell the secret feeling 
that this fresco painting, however admirable in itself, 
has no legitimate right to be where it is, as an ad- 
junct to the architectural effect of the edifice. The 
two arts are naturally distinct in the principles and 
means of addressing the human mind. 

At every step the traveller takes among the show 
edifices of Munich, this question in esthetics still 
recurs to him — Is it sound taste in the fine arts to 
mix up architecture and painting, to produce a joint 
effect ? is it not merely theatrical decoration ? The 
theatre itself at Munich gives an apt illustration of my 
meaning. The edifice has a handsome, a very hand- 
some, front in the Grecian style. Above the archi- 
trave, in the space in which we usually see a group 
of Tragedy, Comedy, the Muses, and such figures, 
either in complete statuary, or in sculpture more or 
less in relief, we have here a fresco painting of such 
figures, very brilliant, not to say tawdry from the 
contrasts of bright colours. This painted figure group 
is felt to be but a paltry substitute for statuary, in a 
solid permanent building. It looks like one of the 
drop-scenes of the stage hung out to dry, or a theatre 
turned inside out ; for the impression of solidity and 
permanency, which is an essential element in architec- 
tural effect, is wanting. A painted canvas, or lath 



PAINTING AND ARCHITECTURE. 335 

and plaster and painted stucco, can produce no archi- 
tectural effect. A pyramid, or a cathedral, or a castle, 
of lath and plaster and painted stucco, would only be 
an unsatisfactory and ludicrous imitation of the archi- 
tectural object, as the essential elements of solidity 
and permanence are wanting. The deception of paint- 
ing the exterior of brick houses like natural blocks of 
stone, and by the trick of the brush giving the mock 
stones veins and weather- stains to deceive the eye, 
proves that the eye naturally seeks reality and the 
solidity and permanence of stone in architecture. In 
the same square with this theatre is another public 
building, the Post Office, presenting a row of pillars 
towards the square. The dead wall behind the 
pillars is painted with a deep, or rather dingy, 
Pompeii red colour; and a horse in white paint, a 
Pegasus or some such device, figures on this dark- 
red ground, which brings out admirably the row of 
pillars in front of it. This is, no doubt, done upon 
very sound principles of stage effect ; but is it on 
sound principles of architectural effect ? is it archi- 
tecture, or is it only an imitation of architecture ? is 
the effect produced by deception, or by reality ? In 
the fine arts no substitute for reality of excellence is 
tolerated. The mere imitation of quality is rejected in 
the fine arts, as well as in the useful arts, and in 
matters of taste, as well as in matters of morals. The 
thing must be genuine, real — a real specimen of the 
good in the art it belongs to, or it is despised. The 
stucco imitation of stone-work, painted weather-stains, 
rough mock-granite, smooth mock-marble, and all the 
brick or stone of the paint-brush, belong to the de- 
corative art, and in it may be meritorious, but belong 
not to architecture. In the decadence of the fine 



336 FRESCO PAINTING. 

arts, the Romans began to decorate their statues with 
coloured eyes, cheeks, and hair, and to ornament them 
with precious stones. Akin to this taste is that of 
mixing up fresco colouring with stucco decoration, 
to produce architectural effect. In spite of Greek or 
Roman authority for painting the exterior of build- 
ings, one feels that painting has no business out of 
doors. 

We are very apt to confound the merit of over- 
coming a great difficulty, with the merit of the work 
produced, and to place the sum total to the credit of 
the latter. In poetry how much passes upon us as 
excellent, not from any poetic excellence in the ideas, 
but from difficulties ably overcome in the versifi- 
cation, rhymes, technical rules of style, unities of 
dramatic composition, or other circumstances ? The 
painting upon wet plaster is unquestionably a great 
difficulty, which can only be overcome by a rare com- 
bination of a sure eye and a ready hand, besides all 
the other qualifications of an artist. The colour, 
whether mixed only with water, as in ordinary fresco 
painting, or with wax to give it body and gloss, as in 
encaustic painting, must be laid on at once, in its full 
intensity, on a space of the plaster kept in a wet state 
to receive it. Fresco painting admits of no coming 
over again, to amend faults in the drawing, colouring, 
or keeping. All the effect must be produced at once, 
in a single stroke of the brush, without retouching. 
This is a great technical difficulty, requiring a rare 
combination of talent in the artist who overcomes it ; 
but we are apt to confound the merit of overcoming 
it with the merit of the art itself. Fresco painting as a 
fine art is, on account of those very difficulties, an im- 
perfect and inferior means, compared to oil painting, 



MUNICH. FRESCO PAINTING. 337 

of representing the pictorial idea, whether that be a 
scene from nature, or a poetical idea of the artist. 
The plaster, no doubt, bears out the raw colours, the 
blues, reds, yellows, with full brilliancy as laid on at 
once from the palette ; but there is no blending, shad- 
ing, heightening, or subduing the tone. The highest 
artistical skill must be required to produce any thing at 
all, with such difficulties in the imperfect means of pro- 
ducing ; but the merit of the artist who accomplishes 
the production, is something very different from the 
merit of the work produced, or of the art itself. The 
artist who walks a mile upon his hands with his legs 
in the air, accomplishes a very difficult work, and may 
have great merit for the ease, grace, and beautv he 
exhibits in his action ; but the merit of the art itself, 
compared to the art of walking the distance on one's 
feet, is rather questionable. The great Italian artists, 
Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Raphael, Domeni- 
chino, overcame the imperfection of the means to 
which they were, it is probable, very unwillingly 
bound — fresco painting being the only means afforded 
them by monks and church officials, who wanted 
cheap, showy, and expeditious work upon their walls — 
and have left in fresco painting some of the noblest 
conceptions that the poetic mind ever expressed in out- 
line and colour. But it is far from evident that those 
great artists preferred the means they were under the 
necessity of using; and it is far from evident that 
Bernard Neher, or Kogel, or Spohr, are Leonardos, or 
Raphaels, or Dominichinos, who did great works with 
imperfect means. Fresco painting, as it is seen here 
in Munich, seems to stand in the same relation to oil 
painting, as the pantomime or melo-drama does to the 
regular drama. The figures, attitudes, expression, 

z 



338 MUNICH. — THE PALACES. 

dresses, are all necessarily exaggerated, not to say 
caricatured, because the means of truthful representa- 
tion are wanting. 

The old garden of the court is a large square area 
filled with dumpy besom-shaped trees stuck in coarse 
gravel. The palace forms one side of the square; a 
barrack with its parade, another ; and the other two 
sides are laid out in a colonnade, that is, a row of 
pillars in front of a wall adorned with compartments 
painted in fresco, and affording a covered walk. A 
few untenanted shops, and a good coffee-room, open 
into the colonnade. The fresco paintings, sixteen in 
number, are historical subjects in bright colours and 
pantomimic attitudes, painted by Cornelius, Zimmer- 
mann, Eockel, and Sturmer. On one side of this co- 
lonnade are twenty-eight landscapes in fresco, repre- 
sentations of towns or scenes in Italy, by Rottman. 
Some of these are clever coloured sketches ; but not so 
superior to the tea-tray landscapes of the Birmingham 
japanner, as the oil painting of a Gaspar Poussin or 
a Claude is to the best landscape among the twenty- 
eight. Each of these landscapes is honoured with 
a distich from the pen of his Bavarian Majesty him- 
self, the ex-king. It cannot be said, that the poetry is 
not equal to its subject ; but kings should be content 
to wield the sceptre of gilt wood studded with jewels, 
and should leave the intellectual sceptre — the poet's 
pen — to those born to it. The royal palace, which 
forms one side of this square, consists of three con- 
nected palaces — the old residence, the new residence, 
and the newest new residence. The old residence 
was built about the year 1600; and from its mag- 
nificence was called, in those days, the eighth wonder 
of the world. Gustavus Adolphus in 1632, when he 



MUNICH THE PALACES. 339 

was master of Bavaria, wished he could put it on 
wheels and carry it home to Stockholm. Splendid 
as it is, this old residence is eclipsed In splendour by 
the two adjoining, and stands like a dim faded thing 
beside them. In them all is gilding, stucco, inlaying, 
precious material, and precious work ; and the powers 
of colour have been exhausted to produce brilliancy 
and magnificence. Nemesis and Nike, Apteros, Chro- 
nos, Himeros, and a hundred other old mythological 
personages under new or restored names, painted in 
encaustic on the walls, grin allegory at you from 
every corner, in all the bombast of the pencil. All is 
attitude, costume, and grimace, contrasts of brilliant 
colours, exaggeration of expression and action, the 
dumb show of the figures in a melo-drama, not the re- 
presentation of nature's men. This German school is 
to the works of the Italian masters what, in dramatic 
art, Bluebeard is to Othello. The magnificence, the 
surpassing splendour, of the succession of gilded 
saloons in the new palaces, overwhelm the spectator. 
If he will confess the truth, he is wearied even to dis- 
gust, at the wild extravagance, gaudiness, unsubstan- 
tially, false grandeur, and false taste, in the pro- 
fusion of gilding, stucco, and fresco colours, above, 
below, and around. He gets through these halls with 
the feeling of all being overdone, of the " too much " 
of splendour rendering splendour effectless. The hall 
of Charlemagne, the hall of Barbarossa, the hall of 
Rudolph of Hapsburg, with paintings in fresco by 
Schnorr, Hess, and other great artists of this German 
pantomimic school of painting, the hall of beauty, 
filled with portraits in oil painting of the most beau- 
tiful ladies of the Bavarian court — reminding one. 
but in considerable contrast both of the subjects and 



340 TASTE ITOR THE TAWDRY IN THE 

execution, of the beauties of the court of Charles II. 
by Vandyke — lead you to the Throne Hall, in which 
stand twelve colossal gilt-brass statues of the ancestors 
of his Majesty, overcoming with the mass of glitter 
and gilding all preceding glitter and gilding. What 
has all this tasteless extravagance cost ? Who have 
worked and toiled, and been taxed and starved, to 
pay for all this fresco, and gilding, and bronze, and 
stucco ? And what are these baubles, after all, as 
objects of fine art ? Is not a single cartoon of Ra- 
phael, as it stands in Hampton Court at this moment, 
worth, as an esthetic object, all the encaustic smearing 
on these roofs and walls ? Is not a single statue in 
the gallery of Florence, worth all the ponderous gilt- 
brass ancestry of the royal house of Wittelsback in the 
Throne Hall? Is not a single reality in architecture, 
statuary, or painting, a single true thing — true to the 
principle which is within us acknowledging the beauti- 
ful — worth all this imitation- work, stucco-work, effect- 
work, gilding, plaster-dyeing, inlaying, and trickery 
in the fine arts ? The characteristic of the Munich 
school of architecture, painting, and sculpture is taw- 
driness. Its highest object is decoration and the in- 
genious toy called the kaleidoscope appears to have 
formed its taste, and to have given the model of what 
it strives to realise by colours and gilding. This taste 
for the tawdry bestuccos, bedaubs, and begilds every 
square foot in the palaces of Munich. All the public 
buildings are not in the same tawdry taste as the Iser 
Gate, the Theatre, the Post-Office, the Arcade, and the 
palaces. The Museum of Sculpture, to which with 
no great taste the barbarous name of Glyptotheque is 
given, is a fine specimen of the chaste classical style 
in its exterior. In the interior it is super -splendidly 



MUNICH SCHOOL OF FINE ART. 341 

decorated in the kaleidoscope style, with bright colours 
and gilding on ceilings of great magnificence. It is 
no doubt an impertinence in fine art that a Schwan- 
thaler, a Cornelius, a Schlotthauer, should intrude 
their conceits in fresco or stucco, their Yenuses, 
Apollos, Cupids, Muses, and such common-place alle- 
gorical figure-furniture, in the central saloon of halls 
filled with the highest works of Grecian art, originals 
or first-rate copies ; and the traveller wonders by what 
taste or reason such tawdry daubs came under the 
same roof with the Egina marbles restored by Thor- 
waldsen, with Canova'fc Venus and Paris, with the 
son of Mobe, the Bacchus, the Medusa ; works of the 
highest class of art. It is as incongruous as a kitchen- 
maid's dishclout in a drawing-room. The Pinaco- 
theque, by which barbarous Greek name we are to 
understand a picture-gallery, is also a vast heavy-look- 
ing edifice, in which nine large saloons and twenty- 
three cabinets contain about 1300 pictures. As the 
Munich school of painters is properly a school of 
house decorators, the specimens of their art of deco- 
ration is not out of place here, and their skill and at- 
tainments in it are exhibited in these two buildings 
with propriety. It is only with the aid of the kaleido- 
scope that the brilliancy of colours, and variety of 
patterns in the fresco painting of the ceilings, can be 
imagined. The splendour of the rooms, however, 
may be no advantage to the pictures they contain ; it 
overpowers the sober beauty of many of the most 
esteemed works. 

It must strike every traveller in Bavaria, and even 
at Munich itself, that the influence of the fine arts in 
producing refinement of manners and habits, is sur- 

z 3 



342 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE FINE ARTS. 

prisingly small. In this very city of Munich, in which 
the revenues of a kingdom are lavished every year on 
the encouragement of the fine arts, so little is the re- 
finement of manners, that, even in the gilded state 
apartments of tho royal residence, in the saloons of 
Apollo and the Graces, you see spitting-boxes filled with 
saw- dust, placed in every corner, to receive the evacua- 
tions which civilised people of any refinement of habits, 
delicacy of taste, or regard for the feelings of others, 
do not allow themselves to make, either in company 
or alone. So little is the sense of comfort developed 
amidst this taste for splendour that, even in the gilded 
palaces, the lodging apartments above the magnifi- 
cent saloons are reached by uncarpeted stone-stairs 
with a hand-rail of common rough rod-iron. This 
civilisation of the fine arts at Munich, appears to 
the reflecting traveller very like the civilisation of the 
North American Indian, who stuccos and paints his 
face in fresco, and smears his skin in encaustic, while 
he has not advanced so far in the useful arts as to 
make himself a waistcoat and pair of breeches to keep 
his body warm. Is it not mere prejudice or the pe- 
dantry of artists to maintain, that a sense and taste 
for the fine arts are a more civilising influence in 
society r than a sense and taste for the comforts and 
enjoyments supplied by the useful arts ? Good cloth- 
ing, good furniture, cleanliness, domestic comfort, and 
all the objects of common taste supplied by the exer- 
cise of the common useful arts, and all the objects of 
acquired taste^ as sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, set in 
movement a greater amount of intellect and industry 
to produce and obtain them, and work upon mankind 
in a vastly wider circle, than all the productions of the 
fine arts in any country. With us r in a city of the 



COMPARED TO THAT OF THE USEFUL ARTS. 343 

size of Berlin or Munich, the middle-class man, the 
tradesman or artisan, sits down, after the toil of the 
day, with his family, to his tea and toast, in his clean 
well- furnished room, surrounded by more articles con- 
tributing to his comfort and gratification, than you 
see in the inhabited apartments of the decorated pa- 
laces of those cities. Is not this the civilisation of 
the useful arts ? The unshaven frowsy German of the 
middle class, or even in rank of a much higher class, 
lounging in glyptotheques, pinacotheques, theatres, or 
concert-rooms, living in a decorated cafe, and his 
family at home living between four bare walls — a bed, 
a table, a mirror, and a few chairs on the cold floor, 
all the conveniences or accommodations of a comfort- 
able living they have any idea of — may be a man of 
consummate taste in the fine arts, may even be an 
artist, as well as an amateur and a judge of art ; but 
he appears to English taste and judgment to stand 
upon a much lower step of civilisation, of intellectual 
culture and social utility, than the man of the same 
class and station with us, whose mind is always exer- 
cised in the many complicated operations, affairs, and 
matters of business in his ordinary trade and daily 
life. Is it not a false importance that is ascribed by 
men of taste to the fine arts ? It appears to the ordi- 
nary traveller, that the wide diffusion in Germany of 
a taste for the enjoyment of the fine arts, has weakened 
the feeling and taste for the enjoyment of the some- 
what more important objects in social life — civil liberty, 
freedom of mind, action, and industry, good govern- 
ment, and constitutional checks upon its folly or ex- 
travagance. Glyptotheques, pinacotheques, fresco paint- 
ings, operas, theatres, ballets, Taglioni, Grisi, and 

Z 4 



344 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE FINE ARTS 

Jenny Lind, are but poor substitutes, after all, for our 
two houses of parliament, trial by jury, open law 
courts, a free press, liberty of thinking, talking, and 
moving about from place to place without control, 
and a few other good things we enjoy, and which the 
cultivation of the fine arts would never have given 
us. The esthetic civilisation has civilised the people 
of Germany out of common sense, out of a right ap- 
preciation of the social and moral value of the things 
before them, out of independence, industry, civil and 
political liberty ; and they are but now beginning to 
awake from its chloroformic influence, and to rave 
about constitutional government and civil liberty, of 
which they feel the want and yet are not prepared to 
enjoy the use. 

An instance of Munich taste struck me in the Pro- 
testant or Evangelical Church at the Carl's Gate. It 

CD 

is a fresco painting on the ceiling, executed, some fif- 
teen years ago, by Hermann, and representing the 
ascension of our Saviour. In this fresco painting, 
God Almighty is represented as an old man with a 
white beard, receiving His Son ascending from earth ! 
This may be good taste and right feeling at Munich, 
and the paltry daub of a picture does not entitle us 
to expect more power in the conception than in the 
execution ; but it would not be reckoned good taste 
or right feeling in any country advanced beyond the 
rudest civilisation, to attempt to paint God Almighty 
in fresco on a church ceiling. The greatest of artists 
have avoided such an attempt, as beyond the scope of 
their art, and inconsistent with the true object of he- 
roic or religious painting, which is the representation 
of human mind embodied in ordinary humanity. When 



COMPAEED TO THAT OF THE USEFUL AKTS. 345 

the ignorant zeal of monks dictated to the great Ita- 
lian artists the subjects or designs of altar-pieces or 
church decorations, the greatest failed in the attempt 
to represent the Supreme Power in the human form. 
The presumption of this Munich artist is equal to his 
taste ; and the taste of his Munich employers, who 
allow such a wretched academic figure, badly copied 
apparently from the common bust of Homer, to stand 
as an adequate representation of their conception of 
the Supreme Being, is on a par with that of the artist. 
The fresco school of Munich painting is caricature ap- 
plied to religious and historical, instead of to comic, 
subjects. Extravagance and exaggeration are the 
principles common to this, and to the avowedly comic 
school. 

If we inquire closely what have been the civilising 
influences which have raised, and are now raising, 
mankind to higher grades of well-being and of moral 
and intellectual attainment, than in ancient times, the 
fine arts would come in for a remarkably small share 
of the honour. Their influences have been confined 
to a small class, and must necessarily always be so. 
That small class — the court, the professional and the 
literary men of a country — considered themselves, 
and in some countries really were, the only public. 
But the gradual advance of society in wealth, well- 
being, knowledge, and occupations requiring intel- 
lectual culture, has raised up a vastly greater class, 
whose civilisation and attainments are in no way con- 
nected with the influence of a taste for architecture, 
statuary, painting, music, or what are called the fine 
arts. The countries in the highest state of moral and 
intellectual culture at the present day, and the classes 



346 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE FINE AETS 

in those countries the most cultivated, morally, intel- 
lectually, and religiously, know little or nothing about 
the fine arts, have no taste in them, and are in no 
way indebted to them. The countries in the lowest 
state of moral, religious, and intellectual culture — 
Italy for instance, and Bavaria — are those in which 
the taste and feeling for the fine arts are most gene- 
rally diffused. The false importance attached to great 
attainments in the fine arts — often the result of mere 
mechanical skill, and of the peculiar natural organi- 
sation of the individual, as in musical attainments — 
seems to mislead the judgment of men in the ordinary 
relations and affairs of life, and to train them to un- 
dervalue moral, social, and religious action, and to 
overvalue esthetic action, or production in the fine 
arts. This is eminently the case in Germany; the 
beautiful is cultivated and esteemed beyond its due 
proportion to the useful. A great proportion of the 
educated cultivated class of Germans are men whose 
taste, imagination, and judgment, in matters connected 
with the fine arts, have been cultivated at the expense 
of sound good sense, and of the steady application of 
their mental powers to the ordinary business of life. 
They are admirable professors, teachers, scholars, 
poets, musicians, and judges in the fine arts ; but poor 
men of business, either in political or social affairs, in 
public or private station. In the middle, and even 
the working, class of the German people, the culti- 
vation of taste in the fine arts has been carried to an 
excess in their education, and has civilised them out 
of prudence, industry, and utility in ordinary life. 
The passion for the enjoyments of taste in the fine 
arts, and the false estimate of the value of men and 



COMPARED TO THAT OF THE USEFUL ARTS. 347 

things when valued according to their esthetic excel- 
lence, may be harmless, and at the worst merely ridi- 
culous, in the highest and unoccupied class in the 
community, who have leisure and wealth to bestow on 
those subjects of taste and fancy ; but they are out of 
place in the class which has to grapple with the stern 
realities of life, and to apply judgment and experience, 
not imagination and feelings, to the affairs around 
them. 



348 MUSIC IN GERMANY — IN ENGLAND. 



CHAP. XIV. 

NOTES ON A REMARKABLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE ANGLO- 
SAXON AND THE OTHER BRANCHES OF THE TEUTONIC RACE, IN 

THE LOVE OF MUSIC. ON MUSIC AND MUSICAL EDUCATION 

NOT SUITABLE TO THE ENGLISH STATE OF SOCIETY. — ON THEA- 
TRICAL REPRESENTATION. FALSE IMPORTANCE GIVEN TO THE 

SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE FINE ARTS ON CIVILISATION. 

It is a remarkable difference between the German 
branch and the English of the same Saxon or Teu- 
tonic race, and one of the first which strikes the 
English traveller in Germany, that the former, the 
German people, are the most musical, and the latter, 
the Anglo-Saxons, the least so, of any people in Europe. 
Is it a physical difference of organisation ? or is it the 
result of different circumstances of education, habits, 
and social condition ? In Germany music is not, as in 
Britain, cultivated and enjoyed only by a few, prin- 
cipally females, in the upper ranks of society, or in 
the wealthiest of the middle class in the great cities ; 
but it enters largely into the habitual occupation and 
enjoyment of all classes, is universally diffused, is 
taught by order of government in all schools, is fa- 
miliar to every individual, practised in every family, 
and is a real social influence, an important element, in 
German life and character. Is this a beneficial in- 
fluence and element in life and character ? Would it 
be possible, or desirable if possible, that our English 
population should be as thoroughly musicalised as the 
German ? The question deserves consideration. 



INFLUENCE ASCRIBED TO MUSIC. 349 

The conventional jargon of the courts, artists, and 
literary men of the times of Louis XIV. and Louis 
XV., which has descended as an heir-loom to the same 
classes in our times, about the humanising influences 
of music and the drama on the human race, and the 
superiority, as efficient means and undeniable proofs 
of civilisation, of the fine arts — the arts which ad- 
minister pleasure through the organs of sense, the eye 
or ear, to the cultivated and refined taste of the upper 
classes — over the vulgar useful arts which diffuse com- 
fort, industry, and intelligence among the mass of 
mankind, has been brought to the test of experience 
in our days. It is not the musician, the fiddler, fifer, 
or bagpiper, who has humanised the Hottentot, and 
raised the New Zealander, the Sandwich Islander, the 
Cherokee, to a higher social and moral condition than 
the lazzaroni of Naples or Kome who have lived under 
the civilising influences of music and the fine arts for 
ages ; but the artisan, the blacksmith, the carpenter, 
the seamstress, and schoolmistress, with her husband 
the missionary. The age of Orpheus is past; the 
stocks and stones of our generation are only to be 
animated, moved, and civilised by higher and more 
intellectual influences and enjoyments than harmony 
of sound. Music, in its most successful efforts, ad- 
dresses mind much less distinctly and intelligibly 
than the most imperfect language. It conveys no 
idea or meaning, but only the impression or feeling 
of the sensations, which ideas sublime, pathetic, gay, 
or agreeable, would produce if conveyed by language. 
Music, which Sir Humphry Davy calls the most in- 
tellectual of our sensual pleasures, may rouse, agitate, 
or soothe, may delight the sense for harmony of sound, 
and thus it undeniably enlarges the circle of human 



350 INFLUENCE OF MUSIC EXAMINED. 

enjoyments, and adds to them a sphere of its own, a 
new world of pleasurable sensations ; but these effects 
are as evanescent as the sounds which produce them. 
The mind and its powers, the intelligence, the judg- 
ment, the moral sense, are not acted upon and exer- 
cised by the most delicious harmony. The musicians 
who produce it, are not themselves more humanised or 
civilised, that is, more moral, virtuous, and intellectual 
members of society, than those who never heard good 
music. The prima donna, or the first fiddle of the 
orchestra, should, by the influence of the civilising art 
they have been all their lives cultivating, be the models 
in society of all that is comprehended under the terms 
of civilisation, refinement, and social worth; yet the 
character of professional musicians is so often the re- 
verse, that the cultivation of the art itself is looked 
upon by many with distrust, as weakening rather than 
strengthening the mind, as wasting time in vague sen- 
sation, and as nourishing passive, rather than active, 
habits in the individual — an effect on character to be 
avoided rather than cultivated. This prejudice against 
music is a re-action of the undue importance bestowed 
formerly, and even now in some classes, on musical 
accomplishment. It had become a fashion to consi- 
der the cultivation of music the most essential branch 
of female education, and that it betokened a rude un- 
uncultivated mind if music was not attained or at- 
tempted. There are many, indeed, who still consider 
the cultivation of music so important a branch of 
education, that they would have it placed in all our 
public schools on the same footing as reading, writing, 
and arithmetic, and would make the teaching of music 
obligatory, as it is in Prussia, in all schools over which 
government has any control. 



MUSIC — WHY NEGLECTED IN ENGLAND. 351 

In the social state of Britain, there are objections 
to this general diffusion of musical taste and skilly 
which are not altogether founded on vulgar prejudice. 
They spring from vulgar good sense, which often 
seizes on the right and expedient in social affairs, 
although not always able to explain the grounds of 
the kind of instinct by which it does so. If the ad- 
vocate for a general musical education of the people 
of Great Britain, would take a walk down any main 
street of London, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, 
in which the busy, striving, intelligent middle class 
— the shopkeepers, tradesmen, and artisans — dwell, 
and ask each shrewd, prudent, respectable father of a 
family, standing behind his counter or his work- 
bench — " Would you like to have your boys and girls 
taught music ? " he would find that ninety -nine out of 
a hundred would, upon full and deliberate considera- 
tion, answer him, " No ! " Their reasons would resolve 
themselves in substance into the following considera- 
tions of the difference between their social position 
and that of the people on the Continent who can afford 
to cultivate music. 

To acquire and keep up any proficiency in music, 
requires considerable practice and time ; an hour every 
day is scarcely sufficient to make a tolerable performer 
on any instrument, or to keep up his proficiency. 
Now, on the Continent, where all handicrafts, trades, 
and branches of industry of every kind are fenced in 
and protected from competition by corporation-privi- 
lege, government licence, and by the want of capital 
among the classes from whom competition with the al- 
ready established tradesmen could spring up, it is very 
natural and possible, and perhaps very suitable and sa- 
lutary, that the young man who is learning his trade, 



352 MUSIC — WHY CULTIVATED ON THE 

or rather who is earning, by a long and unnecessarily 
protracted apprenticeship and journey man ship, the pri- 
vilege to exercise his trade in a kind of monopoly secure 
from intrusion, should have the leisure to bestow an 
hour or two every day in acquiring and keeping up his 
musical skill and taste. It may even be very useful 
in the social state of the Continental people, in which 
mind and social action are not free, and all political, 
religious, and many literary subjects, discussions, and 
conversations, are, or have until lately been, under 
censorship or interdicted, that the youth of the middle 
and lower classes should have some occupation like 
music to turn their minds from prohibited interests 
and objects, something to prevent them from thinking 
on public or local affairs, something unimportant yet 
exciting to bestow their idleness upon. But in our 
free and competition-driven social state, the young 
man has far less spare time, and far more important 
and manly occupations for the little time he has to 
spare. With us, the young man who has to gain his 
living by the "work of his hands or head, cannot in 
general command more than two hours in the twenty- 
four of unbroken healthful leisure. Allowing he has 
but ten hours of actual work, there are two hours, the 
breakfast hour and dinner hour, of broken time passed 
in rest in or near his workshop or factory, and one 
hour must be allowed in the morning to dress, arrange 
his little domestic concerns for the day, and walk to 
his place of business, and one hour on his return, to 
clean himself, market, mend his clothes, and attend 
to such home affairs ; and if he is a diligent active 
workman, he requires at the least eight hours sleep. 
By this summary of the steady operative man's day, 
there are but two hours over for intellectual improve- 



CONTINENT AND NEGLECTED IN ENGLAND. 353 

ment, and social, religious, or domestic duties or en- 
joyments. Is he to spend half of those two precious 
hours of leisure, in learning to blow the flute or play 
the fiddle, or in listening to a concert in a crowded 
alehouse ball-room ? Abroad, labour is not pushed on 
to the same speed of production by a competition in 
every trade and branch of industry ; no business and 
very little work is done in the evening in most or- 
dinary handicrafts. The winter season is a much 
more slack time than with us, communications and 
transit of goods by land or water being more impeded 
by frost and snow. Holidays, also, are much more 
numerous ; and both in Protestant and Catholic coun- 
tries on the Continent, Sunday is a day of music- 
making, balls, and theatrical amusements for the 
middle and lower classes. The young German artisan 
has thus a leisure to apply to music, and to cultivate 
a taste for it, which is unknown to our operatives of 
the same class or trades, and would be incompatible 
with our social institutions and condition. It is not 
denied that a taste, skill, and knowledge in music 
would add much to the enjoyment and innocent re- 
creation of the working man ; but the acquirement of 
this taste, skill, and knowledge, is out of his reach, 
unless by the sacrifice of more important and higher 
attainments, duties, and enjoyments, or such a revo- 
lution in our social arrangements as would give the 
working man leisure to acquire music, without inter- 
fering with the short time he has to bestow on his 
domestic duties and business. 

A consideration, also, of equal importance, is not 
to be lost sight of — the bad effects on our conduct 
in life, of a secondary object being raised in our 
estimation, to the dignity and value of a primary 

A A 



354 MUSICAL EDUCATION UNSUITABLE 

object. The artisan who lias acquired, by much time 
and practice, a certain proficiency on any musical 
instrument, and a certain skill and taste in music, 
must naturally value this proficiency, skill, and taste 
at what it has cost him, and is apt to follow up this 
secondary object of musical attainment at the expense 
of the primary objects on which the well-being of 
himself and his family depends — skill in his work 
and steady prudence in his living. He sees other 
men attain eminence, distinction, and wealth, or, at 
least, an easy living, by their musical proficiency, and 
why should not he ? The stage-struck apprentice, 
deserting his trade for the vagabond life of the heroes 
of the buskin, is but a type, on a small scale, of a 
music-struck operative class, spending the few pre- 
cious hours they have for domestic duties and enjoy- 
ments, or for reading and intellectual improvement 
at home, in practising their parts in the music of a 
forthcoming concert, or listening to the airs of the 
last opera. When they have attained the object, and 
are really as good performers as amateurs can be, 
what have they attained for their time and applica- 
tion ? Has the sacrifice of a great proportion of all 
the leisure hours of their lives to musical proficiency, 
raised them morally or intellectually, given them 
healthful habits of mind and body, given them know- 
ledge, industry, prudence ? If you hold out a false 
object, such as musical proficiency, or a masterly per- 
formance on any favourite instrument or with the 
voice, as something worth attaining at the expense 
of half the leisure time of a working man, and worth, 
consequently, all the knowledge he can acquire in the 
other half, as a means of attaining social considera- 
tion and all that men endeavour to attain by in- 



TO THE ENGLISH STATE OF SOCIETY. 355 

dustry, exertion, intelligence, and good conduct in 
the ordinary walks of life, you educate that man to 
be an adventurer instead of a respectable member of 
society. You deteriorate his character by your edu- 
cation. You give him a false object in life, or false 
means to attain the true object of life. The second 
object, the musical proficiency, becomes the first 
when a man has bestowed his time and powers on its 
attainment for many years. He becomes an indiffe- 
rent workman and an indifferent member of society ; 
because he has attained an eminence in his own 
opinion, and possibly in the opinion of others, by his 
musical accomplishments, independently of skill and 
industry in his trade, or of regular, domestic, and 
moral habits in his daily life. It is owing to this 
false, although in their position very natural, view of 
life that we see actors, musicians, and artists, fre- 
quently despising the ordinary virtues, and as mem- 
bers of society, falling below the class from which 
they came. It is owing to this false view of life, that 
we so often find the German artisan very far below the 
English in activity, vigour, industry, intelligence, and 
skill in his own trade and in all belonging to it, although 
far above the English workman in taste, musical and 
artistical accomplishments, and conversational know- 
ledge. It is owing to the false education giving this 
false view of life in their schools, that we meet so 
many Germans wandering about the world, full of all 
kinds of accomplishments except steady industry and 
habits of application to any ordinary means of earn- 
ing their bread, full of sentiment, honour, knowledge, 
and feeling, yet somewhat deficient in common good 
conduct and good sense, and who, if life were a drama, 
and music, morals, would be well educated men ; but 

A A. 2 



356 MUSICAL EDUCATION EXAMINED. 

in our working world of reality and morality, in 
which amusement is but a secondary concern, are not 
suitably educated for the business of life. Music and 
the fine arts occupy the mind and time of the Conti- 
nental man so entirely, that it is scarcely an exagge- 
ration to say, they are his substitutes for civil and 
political liberty, domestic habits, industry, and skill 
in the useful arts, energy of character, perseverance, 
and all that distinguishes the Englishman. The 
undue place and importance given to esthetic over 
useful acquirements in the education of the former, 
may make better musicians and more enlightened 
amateurs ; but will not make better men or more ef- 
ficient members of society than the latter. The good 
sense of the million with us, may console us for the 
small success of the singing of the million. 

But sacred music ? Psalmody at least ! Is it not 
very desirable that singing and musical proficiency 
should be so far cultivated, that the Psalm tunes, in 
our country churches, should be sung with some 
degree of musical skill, so much, at least, as not to 
shock the ears of the pious and musical of the congre- 
gation ? I would reply to the question by asking two 
or three. First, Where in the New Testament is 
vocal music inculcated or prescribed by our Saviour, 
as a suitable mode of worship ? The singing of hymns 
by the disciples is mentioned ; but not, like prayer, in- 
culcated or prescribed. It rests on the Jewish prac- 
tice before the Christian dispensation. If we refer, 
then, to the Old Testament for authority, we must 
take instrumental music as well as vocal to be suit- 
able worship. The Roman Catholic and the Lutheran 
Churches admit both, and with more consistency 
than our Presbyterian Church, which, in its devo- 



PSALMODY NOT TKUE WORSHIP. 357 

tional exercises admits one — vocal music, and ex- 
cludes the other — instrumental music, without reason 
assigned. But, if music be admitted on the authority 
of the Psalmist David, as suitable worship or devo- 
tional exercise, on the same authority dancing must 
be admitted. King David danced before the ark of 
the covenant as an act of worship. Is the Presbyterian 
prepared to add the Highland fling to his Psalmody? In 
strict consistency of reasoning he must, if he consider 
singing, on the authority of the Old Testament, to be 
a pure and acceptable worship. And why, if he ad- 
mits perceptions, impressions, or emotions conveyed 
to the mind or heart by one of our senses, to be 
holy and to be a true worship, does he exclude those 
conveyed by another and nobler sense, that of sight? 
Why, and with what consistency, does he exclude the 
perceptions, impressions, and emotions conveyed by 
painting or sculpture from the character of holy, and 
admit those conveyed by music? Is the ear a more 
intellectual organ than the eye ? Is a Psalm tune, the 
New London or the Old Carlisle, a more spiritual and 
higher intellectual production than the head of the 
Saviour by Guido, or the crucifixion painted by any 
of the great artists ? The truth is, that the usage of 
the Church since Luther and Calvin established the 
present forms of worship in their respective Churches, 
is the only intelligible argument in favour of music 
being introduced in any way into the service. Luther 
and Calvin were not apostles. Their practice has 
been, and may be, reformed when inconsistent with 
the spirit and common sense of their fellow-men in 
after times. Luther was a true German in his en- 
thusiasm for music. His devotion to it was, even in 
his own times, considered a blameable weakness in his 
character. He retained in his Church service, as much 

A A 3 



358 PSALMODY NOT TRUE WORSHIP. 

as he could of the musical worship of the Church of 
Eome. Calvin, Knox, and the first clergy of the 
Presbyterian Church, found Psalmody a good me- 
chanical expedient, which it really is, for affording a 
necessary pause and rest to the mind, both of the 
preacher and congregation, after a long prayer and 
sermon requiring the most fatiguing exertion and 
attention. To prevent this Psalmody, however, be- 
coming a mere musical worship, it is customary in 
some Presbyterian churches, and in all on days of 
dispensing the sacrament, to read a line and sing it, 
without continuity of music or regard to time. The 
Presbyterian minister, who considers Church music 
as a suitable worship, and as such, an art which ought 
to be taught in all places of education of youth and 
cultivated by all congregations of Christian people, 
will do well to pause before he invests music, or paint- 
ing, or sculpture, with any such holy character. He 
will find that, if he admit one, he must admit the 
other, he must admit a principle from which all the 
pageantry and idolatry of the Roman Catholic forms 
of worship are very legitimately deduced. He will find 
that he has got upon a railway, of which the terminus 
is Rome, without a station to stop at, with any con- 
sistency of reasoning, between pure spiritual Presby- 
terianism and rank Popery. 

These are considerations which should make many 
fathers of families in the middle and lower stations of 
society, hesitate about a musical education for their 
children in our public or private schools. The 
whistle may cost more than it is worth. 

The drama, or rather theatrical representation is, 
like music, a branch of the esthetic of which the in- 
fluence on society has been ridiculously overrated. 
According to Yoltaire and the literary men of his 



IS THE DRAMA A TEST OF CIVILISATION? 359 

age and school, the civilisation and intellectual con- 
dition of a people are more significantly indicated, 
and more truly measured, by the state of the drama 
among them than by any other test. In the court 
of France, from the days of Louis XIV. and his 
successors, and in all the petty imitative German 
courts which adopted the opinions and follies of the 
philosophers and nobility of France, the theatre was 
considered a very important social power, not in- 
ferior in its influence on the civilisation of a country 
to that of the Church, universities, or schools, and, 
like those establishments, to be maintained by the 
state out of the public revenues. If all the state 
revenues expended in France and Germany, since the 
age of Louis XIV., on theatres, opera-houses, actors, 
and singers, had been laid out on schools, teachers, 
libraries, and other educational means for the people, 
the moral and intellectual condition of society in 
Europe would have been very far in advance of its 
present state. The opinion of the great social im- 
portance of the stage was not confined to the circle of 
nobles, courtiers, and literary men idling about the 
great seats of monarchy, such as Paris, Vienna, Berlin, 
and fancying themselves the world, or the representa- 
tives, at least, and the models to the world, of true 
philosophy, civilisation, manners, and all that the 
world should adopt. We find such great men as 
Gothe and Schiller seriously occupying themselves in 
the petty country towns of Weimar, Stuttgard, and Jena, 
about the rehearsals, dresses, and drill of the theatri- 
cal corps supported at the little courts, discussing the 
cut and colour of the jackets and helmets of the actors, 
and evidently considering theatrical representation, 
and all the details of the stage business, as matters of 

A A 4 



360 FALSE ESTIMATE OF THE IMPORTANCE 

Infinite importance to mankind, and deserving all 
the time and attention even of their minds. On the 
Continent this heir-loom opinion has descended to the 
governments of the present day ; and in France, 
Prussia, Bavaria, Wtirtemberg, in the midst of empty 
exchequers, forced loans, and impending bankruptcy 
produced by the events of 1848-1849, the governments 
think it a wise and honest policy to devote large sums 
annually — in France about half a million of francs in 
1849 — to the support of the theatre, and to tax the 
country for the amusements of the metropolis. That 
the Hof-theater, court theatre, national theatre, opera, 
or whatever the favoured theatrical establishment is 
called, should be supported by those who have the 
benefit or pleasure of attending it, and not by taxes 
on those who cannot attend it, seems an idea of justice 
not at all suited to Continental legislation, 

This high and false estimate of the importance of 
theatrical representation was never so generally adopted 
in England as on the Continent. The English govern- 
ment never ventured to apply the public revenues to 
the support of the theatres. A large proportion of 
the people of England were always too religious — a 
still larger too busy, too industrious, too domestic in 
their habits, too economical of their time and money, 
to value theatrical representation above its worth as 
a moral or beneficial influence in society ; and none, 
either among the governing class or the governed, 
were ever sunk so low in their sense of right and 
justice, as to attempt or permit the misapplication of 
the public revenue derived from their taxes, to the 
building and supporting of places of amusement for 
the wealthy inhabitants of the capital. There are, 
however, in England not a few of an old and expiring 



OF THEATRICAL AMUSEMENT. 361 

school who lament the decline and fall of dramatic 
taste and production among us. the total neglect by 
the public of what they call the " legitimate drama," 
the want of interest in our degenerate days about 
theatrical business or gossip, or even about first-rate 
acting in first-rate plays, and who seriously consider 
this apathy about stage affairs as an indication of some 
portentous decay in the moral and intellectual condition 
of the English people. What may be the true cause 
of this undeniable change among us, in the public 
estimate of the pleasure or value of theatrical repre- 
sentation ? It cannot be denied that with us, in the 
present age, theatres are empty buildings, actors a 
neglected people, and the stage, with all its assumed 
importance as a means and test of civilisation and 
a great social power, a thing forgotten and scarcely 
heard of beyond a small uninfluential circle. The 
subject is curious. This decadence of the theatre 
seems to be somehow connected with the moral, intel- 
lectual, and industrial progress of the people, and an 
indication of their advance, not of their decline, in 
intellectual pursuits and enjoyments. What may be 
the causes of this general decay of theatrical amuse- 
ment? It is advancing so rapidly that in another 
generation, if there be no reaction, theatres — at least 
the self-supported — will cease to exist. The subject 
deserves consideration. Shakespeare composed his 
plays between 1590 and 1614. About 220 years 
divide the age of Hamlet and King Lear from that of 
Jack Shepherd and Jim Crow. These dramatic pieces 
are unquestionably the exponents of the dramatic taste 
and production of their respective times. It cannot 
be denied, that each is the type of that kind of dramatic 
representation which, in its day pleased and satisfied 



362 DECAY OF THEATRICAL TASTE IN ENGLAND. 

the play-going public. We cannot, however, persuade 
ourselves that, during these eleven-score years, the 
public mind in this country, and its civilisation, have 
been going backward in proportion to the undeniable 
decay of its drama — that the taste and feeling for 
the natural, the good, the great, in human action, 
the quick sympathy with distress and woe, the keen 
sense of the ludicrous, the lively pleasure in marking 
character gradually unfolding itself through the inci- 
dents of a well-imagined story, are less intense in 
England now than in the days of Queen Elizabeth — 
that they have been worn out, and that now, in the 
nineteenth century, the public mind has come to its 
second childhood — to Punch and Judy. We rather 
question the infallibility of the test, than the reality 
of the advance of the moral and intellectual state of 
England during these two centuries. The measuring- 
tape which poets, critics, actors, and philosophers of 
the French court and school apply to measure the 
growth of the child may, perhaps, be too short to 
measure the full stature of the man. Here we are, at 
any rate, in an age not remarkably deficient in culti- 
vation of mind, not remarkably indifferent to the en- 
joyment of pleasure intellectual and physical, not 
remarkably poor, nor remarkably stupid, yet with its 
theatres falling into ruins, its dramatic representations 
addressed, not to the heart or understanding, but to 
the eye and ear, and totally disregarded if they attempt 
any higher and more intellectual objects than pa- 
geantry, music, ballets, operas, which may delight the 
child, or the classes of society still in the childhood of 
mind — the very lowest and the very highest — but 
are unintelligible to, and, as rational amusements, re- 
pudiated by the great body of the educated and intel- 



STAGE AND STATE CONNECTED ABROAD. 363 

lectual of modern society. This remarkable direction 
of the public taste and mind, so opposite to the theories 
of the last generation on the importance and influence 
of the theatre on modern civilisation — so opposite to 
the speculations of the literary men of the last cen- 
tury, and of many of the present times, on the social 
value of a wide diffusion, by state means, of a taste 
for all the esthetic arts, music, painting, architecture, 
and theatrical representation, as civilising intellectual 
influences with which the public should be inoculated 
by act of Parliament and by profuse grants of public 
money, is one of the most important of the intellectual 
phenomena of the age. It belongs to a branch of 
statistics — the progress of the public mind in Europe 
— scarcely less important, although less noticed, than 
the progress of the national wealth, population, or 
material interests of a country. 

On the Continent, the faith in the old French 
notion of the value of theatrical representations as a 
social influence, still prevails. The stage and state 
abroad are as closely connected as the Church and 
state with us, and on the same principle — the belief 
that the theatre is a potent social influence, which 
the government alone should wield. The exaggerated 
importance attached to theatrical representation on 
the Continent, may be judged of by any man of com- 
mon sense who reads the memoirs of Gothe, or any 
of the eminent literary men of Germany, and it is 
displayed in all its absurdity by the Almanac of Von 
Wolf, for 1840. In that year, Count von Redcren 
was minister of state for theatrical affairs at Berlin, a 
formal appointment among the ministers of the time. 
The privy counsellors, Esperstedt, Weiss, Slawinsky, 
and Carl Blum, were of the board of directors; and 



/ 



364 IMPORTANCE OF THEATRES ABROAD. 

under or connected with the board were thirty- six 
other functionaries. Our East India Company has 
not a more complete organisation for the government 
of its affairs. All this "much ado about nothing" 
gives a lively picture of the functionary system. This 
body of idle functionaries, living by the superinten- 
dence of the theatre, is altogether exclusive of the 
actors, actresses, singers, musicians, dancers, and other 
performers belonging to the theatrical corps itself. 
They are government functionaries. Germany has the 
benefit of sixty-five fixed state theatres, besides the 
licensed occasional theatres in country towns, and of 
1224 male actors, 917 female, 622 male singers, 623 
female, 219 male ballet dancers, and 229 female, 
and in all of 3834 persons on the stage, besides 
tradesmen, scene-shifters, and candle-snuffers, to dis- 
seminate the civilisation and morals of theatrical re- 
presentation. The profession itself is much more 
highly considered than in our more busy country. 
The members of it who have attained a permanent 
position, that is, an engagement in the state theatres, 
are better off than actors in England. They have 
pensions on retirement from old age or ill health, and 
are allowed, without loss of pay, to retire on furlough 
for a few weeks occasionally ; and a pretty sharp dis- 
cipline is kept up by the superintending government, 
maintaining regularity, propriety of conduct, and re- 
spectability of character, among the lowest members 
of the profession. 

The most flourishing period of the stage in England, 
in a pecuniary view, was probably in the first ten 
years of this century, when the country was filled 
with troops, militia, and volunteers, drawing pay, and 
spending money in every small town, and a bustling 



DECAY OF THEATRES IN ENGLAND. 365 

military spirit prevailed throughout the land. E very- 
county town at that time had a visit, for part of the 
year, from a theatrical company. Theatres were good 
properties in such towns as Dover, Canterbury, Ches- 
ter, and in some of minor note. The judges were not 
more regular in their circuits and assizes, than the 
managers of these itinerating companies. Country 
gentlemen, in those days, considered it a kind of 
educational duty to their families, to give them an 
opportunity of seeing two or three good plays every 
season at the county town. Strolling players, from 
the single family, or individual spout er of dramatic 
poetry, to the pretty full and well appointed troop, 
supplied the still smaller towns and villages with 
theatrical representations ; and a considerable body 
of people, although never equal to the theatrical corps 
of Germany, made a living by the taste of the public 
for the drama. If this taste fell off suddenly to its 
present very low state, towards the conclusion of the 
war, it cannot be ascribed to the want of able actors, 
tragic and comic, to support and keep it alive. Sid- 
dons, Kemble, Farren, Jordan, O'Neill, Cooke, Kean, 
Bannister, Munden, Suet, and many more than I can 
enumerate or remember, of distinguished excellence 
in their several departments, were either contempo- 
raries on the stage, or in quick succession to each 
other, at the very period immediately preceding its 
downfal. The highest talents and acquirements ever 
applied to dramatic representation in any age or 
country, were in full activity, and not a few of the 
most eminent performers, the two Mrs. Siddons, John 
Kemble, Miss Farren, Miss O'Neill, were individuals 
moving in the highest and most select circles of the 
good, the educated, and distinguished of the land, 



366 CAUSES OF THE DECAY IN ENGLAND, 

conferring honour, rather than receiving it, by their 
virtues, accomplishments, and estimable private cha- 
racters. Yet even in their clays the theatres began 
to totter. The want of a play-going public began to 
be complained of. Empty benches too often echoed 
back even the tones of a Siddons ; and when the cluster 
of great performers who were coeval with the Kemble 
family on our stage, gradually disappeared from the 
scene of life, the British theatre fell — fell to what it 
now is, and naturally should be, an affair for pleasing 
the eye and ear — for gratifying the taste for the 
beautiful in what addresses itself to the eye and the 
ear, when these organs are cultivated and refined, but 
having no moral weight or worth, no influence in 
modern society, and no necessary connection with the 
higher intellectual acquirements of educated men. 

Ingenious conjectures have been made on the cause 
of this obvious change and remarkable decline among 
us of the public taste for dramatic representation. 
Some would account for it simply by the change of 
the hours at which families of the upper classes now 
in general dine, in consequence of which, their attend- 
ance at the theatre interferes with their domestic ar- 
rangements and habits. But this is a change in names 
rather than in hours. The late dinner of our times 
is the supper of the times of Charles II. , when, accord- 
ing to Pepys's Memoirs, it was an important part of 
the business of life with the most seriously occupied 
men, to attend the theatres. The social amusements 
and domestic habits of the upper classes interfere even 
less now with play-going, if they were so inclined, 
than at any former period. Gentlemen do not now 
sit all the evening over their wine, and the perpetual 
rubber at whist is no longer the family occupation, 



OF THE TASTE FOR DRAMATIC REPRESENTATION. 367 

night after night, all the year round. Others account 
for it by supposing that the managers of our great 
theatres corrupted the public taste by pageants, pan- 
tomimes, and shows which could only amuse the vul- 
gar, and thus made all amusement of the theatre 
vulgar in public estimation. But managers follow, 
and do not lead, the public taste. If coronation pro- 
cessions, the real elephant from Exeter Change, Van 
Amburgh and his lions, Tom and Jerry, and Jim 
Crow fill the houses, and Hamlet and Macbeth, and 
all the talents of Macready or Kean, are expended on 
empty benches, managers cannot be justly blamed for 
gratifying the public taste as they find it. These are 
the consequences, not the causes, of some great change 
in the public mind and in the social and intellectual 
condition of the people. The causes probably lie 
deeper. 

In all theatrical representation two very distinct 
elements are involved, the dramatic and the histrionic. 
These are not necessarily connected, although, in esti- 
mating the value of the stage or the merit of the actor, 
the excellence of the drama is always mixed up with 
the excellence of the representation, and the joint 
value of the two is usually booked off to the credit of 
theatrical representation. The drama conveys to the 
mind fiction clothed in the garb of reality, sentiments, 
feelings, actions, combined by the highest efforts of 
poetical genius into one display of character, passion, 
and nature ; and no production of the human mind is 
so rare, so diflicult, so morally and intellectually great, 
as a great drama. But the impression intended by 
the great dramatist, the meaning, sentiments, feelings, 
passions, and actions of the personages of his drama, 
may be conveyed, in our times and social state, from 



368 DECAY OF THEATRES IN ENGLAND. 

mind to mind — from the mind that conceives and 
expresses, to the mind that receives and is to be im- 
pressed — by other and, in our advanced state of in- 
tellectual culture, by much shorter and more efficient 
means than the histrionic art in acting or theatrical 
representation. The diffusion of letters, of habits of 
reading and of receiving ideas by printed instead of 
spoken words, has entirely superseded the necessity or 
use of exhibiting to the mind, through the tedious 
machinery of theatrical representation, the ipsissima 
corpora, as it may be called, of the ideas, sentiments, 
passions, feelings, and actions to be conveyed by the 
great dramatist. The decay of the theatre is, in 
reality, a proof of the advance of the public mind. It 
shows the progress of education among the European 
people more clearly than any other indication. In 
rude ages, law, religion, government had to express 
themselves by representation on the same principle as 
the drama. There was a hieroglyphic language used 
in all human affairs . The delivery of a sod, of a twig, 
of a stone, represents, at this day, in ancient forms of 
law, the delivery of landed property. " Among savage 
nations," says Gibbon, in chapter xliv. of the " Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Empire," "the want of letters 
is imperfectly supplied by the use of visible signs, 
which awaken attention and perpetuate the remem- 
brance of any public or private transaction. The ju- 
risprudence of the first Romans exhibited the scenes 
of a pantomime ; the words were adapted to the ges- 
tures, and the slightest error or neglect in the forms 
of proceeding was sufficient to annul the substance of 
the fairest claim. The communion of the marriage 
life was denoted by the necessary elements of fire and 
water: and the divorced wife resigned the bundle of 



SYMBOLICAL LANGUAGE. 369 

keys, by the delivery of which she had been invested 
with the government of the family. The manumis- 
sion of a son or a slave was performed by turning him 
round with a gentle blow on the cheek ; a work was 
prohibited by the casting of a stone ; prescription was 
interrupted by the breaking of a branch ; the clenched 
list was the symbol of a pledge or deposit ; the right 
hand was the gift of faith and confidence. The inden- 
ture of covenants was a broken straw ; weights and 
scales were introduced into every payment ; and the 
heir who accepted a testament, was sometimes obliged 
to snap his fingers, to cast away his garments, and to 
leap and dance with real or affected transport." 

The use of rude symbols to supply the deficiencies 
of a rude language and an uncultivated mind, the 
theatrical representation of the realities themselves or 
their material resemblances, in order to convey and 
impress the meaning, appear common to all nations 
in an early uncivilised state. The jurisprudence of 
the first Romans, and the importance of the symboli- 
cal forms of proceeding in which the least error or 
neglect was sufficient to annul the substance of the 
fairest claims, is precisely the jurisprudence of the 
early Scandinavians, as we find it in the " Saga" and 
the u Icelandic Graagas." The stick burnt at one end 
and tinged with blood at the other, sent from hand to 
hand through a Highland glen, or a war-arrow split 
into four parts and sent out to the four quarters of 
the land, to gather men in arms to a common centre 
for warlike enterprise, were, to a late period, the 
means used, in the Highlands and in Scandinavia, for 
giving intimation to the people, by the representation 
of material objects, that they were to assemble with 
weapons for military duty under their government, 

B B 



370 THE PRINCIPLE OF REPRESENTATION COMMON 

In every age and country religion has been taught, in 
the infancy of human mind, by the representation of 
material objects for conveying and impressing spiri- 
tual truths. Idolatry has had no other origin than 
the natural deficiency of language among men in a 
rude and uncivilised state, the natural want of words, 
in such a state, to convey abstract ideas, and of any 
other means than images, representations, and physical 
objects to transmit from mind to mind the religious 
conceptions, which even spoken and written languages 
in the highest state of cultivation, and rich in words 
and expressions delicate, yet defined in meaning, are 
scarcely able to transmit among civilised and educated 
people. Ceremonies, processions, images, pictures, 
crucifixes, altars, and all the scenery of worship, were 
originally, in fact, a kind of language; and, in the 
early ages of the Church, when Christianity was only 
listened to by the most ignorant classes and was re- 
pudiated by the educated, a very needful kind of lan- 
guage. Intelligence was wanting, and language was 
wanting, and the mind in such a social state received 
ideas and sentiments better by the eye than by the 
ear or by the understanding of language. The senses 
had to be impressed by the material representation. 
The means were suited to the mental condition of so- 
ciety, and to the deficiency of the language of a rude 
uncultivated people. It is absurd in our missionary 
societies and missionaries to declaim, as they do, 
against the idol-worship and idols of the heathens, 
either in past or present times, without considering 
that the mental condition of these heathens, and their 
language which is the exponent of that condition, 
admit of no expressions of religious ideas or senti- 
ment by words, possess no abstract ideas or equiva- 



TO THE CHURCH AND THE STAGE. 371 

lent words, and that they could have had no religion 
at all without first having had the impression through 
the medium of material objects, symbols, idols, and 
representation — theatrical representation in fact, or, 
at least, its principle. In a much more advanced 
state of society, of language, and of intellectual cul- 
ture, we still find material objects, representations, 
and ceremonies resorted to, for conveying religious 
ideas, devotional feelings, and spiritual impressions. 
As education advances, mind is unfolded, language 
enriched, and the necessity, importance, and estima- 
tion of the material, ceremonial, and, as it may be 
called, histrionic principle in religion, decline, and 
the value and use of the purely spiritual principle in 
religion advance. It is in South America, in Portu- 
gal, in countries, localities, and classes of society to 
which the influences of education and social move- 
ment on mind and language, have scarcely yet ex- 
tended, that the religion of the middle ages, the pro- 
cessions, holy images, relics, and all the machinery 
of the representation principle, still flourish. These 
means of religious edification are no longer suited to 
the educated of the Roman Catholic countries in 
Europe, and are falling everywhere into disuse and 
contempt. It is also among the least-educated popu- 
lations and classes in modern society, it is in the 
great commercial cities of Xew York, Liverpool, 
Hamburgh, in which business and labour of routine 
abridge mental culture, or in military cities, Peters- 
burg, Berlin, Vienna, in which duties of routine have 
the same effect on the mental culture of great masses 
of the inhabitants, that theatres still flourish, and the 
histrionic art is in some esteem, or at least draws out 
a lingering existence. The less perfect mode of mind 

B II 2 



372 THE PRINCIPLE OF REPRESENTATION IN THE 

acting upon mind, is, however, gradually giving way 
before the more perfect. There is no more danger of 
Popery, Puseyism, or any other form of ceremonial 
religion founded on the principle of material or 
theatrical representation, becoming predominant in 
modern society, than of educated people conversant 
with language going back to the use of symbols, signs, 
and gestures, to express their sentiments. The cere- 
monial Church and the stage have both sprung from 
the same root, and have flourished and are decaying 
together; not because the root, the representation 
principle, common to both, was in itself false or un- 
suitable in the ages when mind and language were in 
a rude uncultivated condition, but because society has 
outgrown that condition, and has now got the capa- 
city and means of drawing religious instruction direct 
from the Scriptures, moral and intellectual instruction 
or amusement direct from books, and requires no 
longer that the mind should be addressed through the 
organs of sense, and by scenic representation, either 
in churches or theatres. 

The steps by which the public mind in Britain has 
made this advance in our times, may be clearly traced 
by those who remember the beginning of the present 
century. The events of the war made fiction dull. 
All men were under excitement, were deeply and per- 
sonally interested in ever}' event, in every success or 
defeat of our arms by sea or land, in every act of our 
government ; and read, considered, and discussed the 
news of the day much more eagerly than in ordinary 
times of peace. The war was the great schoolmaster. 
The demand for information produced a supply, news- 
papers multiplied, and the public mind was extended, 
exercised, and perpetually engaged on subjects of the 



CHURCH AND ON THE STAGE IN DECAY. 373 

highest interest. Political journals were followed by 
other periodical works, and a literature for all capa- 
cities and degrees of knowledge arose among us. 
Circulating libraries, reading-rooms, book clubs, be- 
came as common as bakers' shops, and food for the 
mind was in general request. The novels of the 
school of Charlotte Smith and Miss Burney were fol- 
lowed by the romances of the school of Mrs. Radcliffe. 
The novels of Sir Walter Scott filled up the supply 
to imaginative readers, of all that the drama had ever 
yielded to them of amusement, either in genteel co- 
medy, romantic tragedy, or historical plays. The 
many only read for amusement^ and find amuse- 
ment in whatever makes no demand upon their pa- 
tience, intelligence, or comfort. This was the class 
which filled the theatres. They soon discovered that 
it was much less comfortable, amusing, and cheap to 
sit with their families in a theatre, always too cold or 
too hot, for six hours, at the expense of a guinea, and 
wearied to death with the pauses between the acts, and 
the noises and interruptions, than to read or listen to 
a dramatic tale at their own firesides, at the cost of 
a penny a night, and which the circulating library in 
the next street can supply in countless numbers suited 
to every taste and capacity. Play -going was, per- 
haps, at best an exotic fashion in England, introduced 
and supported rather by the affectation of following 
the fashion of the court, than by any impulse from 
the habits and character of the people. When other 
means of intellectual enjoyment, and the education to 
use those means, became common, the English people 
fell back upon their national, and in their climate na- 
tural, domestic habits of enjoying the evenings and 
nights at home, in doors, and at their own fire sides. 

iiu 3 



374 EFFECTS OF ESTHETIC EDUCATION 

In Scotland play-going was always, like fox-hunting or 
horse-racing, an amusement foreign to the character 
and habits of the people. The theatre has had no 
influence, the fine arts no share in the formation of 
the public mind and character of the Scotch people. 
Their intellectuality and civilisation owe nothing to 
the brush, the chisel, or the fiddlestick. Do they 
stand in a remarkably low intellectual, moral, or so- 
cial state, compared to the nations which have had all 
the theatrical and esthetic influences educating and 
civilising them ; compared, for instance, to the Bava- 
rians, Italians, Prussians, French ? Munich, Naples, 
Berlin, Paris, where the fine arts and histrionic re- 
presentations are most generally cultivated, esteemed, 
and enjoyed by the people, and encouraged by their 
governments at the most lavish expense as the basis 
of civilisation, are notoriously in a lower social con- 
dition, more debased by ignorance, idleness, and vice, 
than any of our great cities. A people of amateurs 
and artists are, no doubt, excellent subjects for auto- 
cratic governments. All the petty gossip about new 
operas, great performers, theatrical novelties, shows, 
paintings, statues, music, occupy the public mind, to 
the exclusion of public interests and social duties, and 
of the exercise of private judgment on public affairs. 
All is left to the state functionary. In Italy, Ger- 
many, France, Denmark, Sweden, in every country, 
great or small, in which the public mind is cultivated 
on the esthetic principle, that is, by the diffusion of 
the fine arts and of a general taste for them as the 
means of civilisation, we find freedom, constitutional 
government, and the influence of public opinion, in 
an inverse ratio to the diffusion of taste and attain- 
ments in those fine arts. This formation of the pub- 



ON THE CHARACTER OF A PEOPLE. 375 

lie mind on the esthetic, may suit the absolute irre- 
sponsible governments, and the half-military people 
of the Continent ; but the civilisation formed on mo- 
rality, religion, freedom, civil rights, free action, and 
industry, is most suitable to our social state. The 
soft waxen character of the German people, receiving 
every impression, romantic, mystic, full of deep feeling 
and enthusiasm about trifles, and regarding with 
apathy and indifference real social interests, civil 
rights, and public affairs, seems closely connected with 
their education on the esthetic principle, with the 
refinement and civilisation of the fine arts carried to 
excess in their schools and domestic life. The natu- 
rally deep-thinking independently acting character, 
which belongs to the German people, has been refined 
away. One excitement or novelty of the day drives 
away another. It is Ronge and Czerski, and their 
German Church, succeeded by Presnitz and the cold 
water cure, followed by Antigone, or Taglioni the 
dancer, or Jenny Lind the singer, or the Reichsver- 
weser and a German navy, German unity, and the 
Danish war, that occupy these powerful thinkers 
and feeble doers; and subjects are taken up in turn 
with a kind of enthusiasm, and are dropped again 
as suddenly and as unaccountably as they are taken 
up. The esthetic merit eclipses in the public mind 
of our Saxon brethren all other merit. Whoever re- 
flects on the social and political evils, the want of 
freedom of mind, person, and property, patiently sub- 
mitted to by the German people in the most culti- 
vated, educated, refined, talentful, and tasteful coun- 
tries, such as Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, will think 
that the development of society may be stationary, 
or even retrograde, under the widest diffusion of 

n n 4 



376 EFFECTS OF ESTHETIC EDUCATION. 

this kind of education and character, and comparing 
the social condition of our country with that of the 
Continent, will come to the conclusion, that the mind 
of a people educated and exercised in the ordinary 
business and duties of life on moral and religious 
principles, carries civil liberty and just social ar- 
rangements alone: with its advance: and educated 
and exercised in esthetics which have no relation to 
social interests or real affairs, is prepared by false 
views of the importance of objects, and by effeminate 
habits of thinking, and acting, and living only for 
amusement, to submit to any misrule or social evil 
that does not interfere with the individual's personal 
gratification of his amateur tastes. The German 
commotions of 1848-1849, the want of sober common 
sense in the objects and views of the public, and of 
the leaders of the public mind, the excess of enthu- 
siasm for impracticable ends, and of apathy and in- 
difference for the attainable and needful, justify the 
conclusion that the too great cultivation of the esthetic 
in Germany is a great misfortune to society ; is a very 
inefficient education for thinking and acting ; is orna- 
mental rather than useful in its results ; and is not a 
kind of intellectual cultivation suited to the character 
and social condition of the people of England. 



GERMAN WATERING-PLACES. 377 



CHAP. XV. 

NOTES ON GERMAN WATERING-PLACES. — MANNERS. — ROAD TO THE 

TYROL. SIMILARITY OF THE TYROL AND NORWAY BUILDINGS 

PEOPLE. KREUT. INNSBRUCK. LANDECK. MALS. ME- 

RAN BEAUTIFUL SCENERY— PICTURESQUE COSTUME. MIXED 

RACES AND PURE RACES OF PEOPLE. — THE SILK CULTURE 

ITS EFFECTS ON THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE. THE ROMAN 

CATHOLIC CHURCH ITS INFLUENCE ON THE SOCIAL STATE OF 

THE MIDDLE AGES STILL OF BENEFIT AS A THIRD INDEPENDENT 

POWER BETWEEN THE AUTOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS OF THE CON- 
TINENT AND THE PEOPLE. THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT WITH 

THE POPE ITS FAILURE AS A USEFUL OR PEACEFUL AGREE- 
MENT. 

Every German must repair, for a few weeks in sum- 
mer, to some watering-place, to wash his inside or 
outside with celebrated water. It is, in modern Ger- 
many, what pilgrimages were in former times ; a sa- 
tisfactory excuse to one's self for doing what is agree- 
able. The distant shrine and its miraculous effects 
are sought for now only by the lowest of the poor and 
ignorant, the third class passengers on the railway of 
life ; yet the man of the higher classes hastening up 
or down the Rhine, to Baden, Wiesbaden, Homburg, 
or Emms, need not look with scorn at the bands of 
pilgrims he meets along the Rhine, on their way to 
the shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne, or of the 
Holy Coat at Treves. He is engaged himself in a 
pilgrimage much less spiritual, quite as absurd and 
ineffectual, and much less respectable, in so far that 
he is seeking the inferior objects, bodily health and 



378 CLASSES. MANNERS. 

recreation, through ease, pleasure, and good living, 
and they are seeking salvation according to their 
ideas of religious duty, through privation and en- 
durance. The class of people in Germany, who fre- 
quent the Bads, is lower in social station than that 
which fills our watering-places. A man with us must 
be in easy circumstances, or well up in the world, 
before he thinks of going to Bath, Cheltenham, or 
Brighton, without some serious illness compelling him. 
Here, the watchmaker will leave his shop to go to a 
Bad for a few weeks. The expenses are moderate 
and fixed by tariff, the table d'hote levels all distinc- 
tions founded on the mere expenditure of the visitors, 
and the tradesman or family of the middle class is 
not exposed to extravagant charges or supercilious 
treatment or remarks at a German watering-place. 
It is from the many, not from the few, that the hotel 
keeper lives in those large and crowded establish- 
ments ; and one of the many is quite as well treated 
as one of the few, which is very different from the 
way of our English inns or hotels. The manners, 
also, of all classes in Germany are so nearly the same, 
that there is no incongruity in their mixing together. 
All, from the prince to the shoemaker, are what our 
dainty gentry would call slovenly livers, dirty feeders, 
and insensible to the disgust they may give by habits 
confined, among us, to our lowest and most roughly 
bred classes. Spitting all round a room, picking their 
teeth at meals with the knife, licking it, and thrusting 
it into the butter or cheese, and such petty abomi- 
nations, show that there is not that marked difference 
in those small observances of delicacy, and of regard 
for the feelings of others, in manners and behaviour, 
which distinguish the gentleman from the non- 
o-entleman in our population. At table, or in the 



WANT OF CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS. 379 

habits and usages of living, the artisan or tradesman, 
in Germany, is quite as nice and gentlemanlike as 
the count or baron ; or rather, the count or baron is 
quite as coarse and vulgar as the tradesman or ar- 
tisan. This want of habitual refinement or consider- 
ation for others, and want of respect for one's self 
in the small matters of manners and ways of living, 
this want of consideration of what may be disagree- 
able or disgusting to one's neighbours, is a great 
defect in the German character. It obliges even 
the best- educated and most estimable German gen- 
tlemen, when they travel in France or England, 
to put on a refinement altogether foreign to their 
every day habits at home. On this account, the Ger- 
mans make the worst of travellers. They set out 
with a lower standard of manners and habits of living 
than that of the same class in the countries they visit. 
It is owing to this want of innate or habitual taste in 
manners and mode of living with themselves, which 
gentlemen of the same station in other countries are 
bred up with, that men of rank, education, and for- 
tune, from Germany, are very often scarcely tolerated 
in ordinary lodging-houses, and are very rarely at 
home and at ease in English families of the same class 
as themselves, or often very inferior to themselves in 
all essential distinctions. They return home asto- 
nished, disappointed, and full of wrath ; because their 
real merit and importance had not been appreciated 
by the English people. The reason is, that an English 
family, especially the female part of it, is excessively 
fastidious and over-nice about all the minor morals, 
as they have been called, of manners and habits. A 
German gentleman fuming tobacco from every pore, 
hawking and spitting incessantly, all over the floor, 
telling you in more ways than one that he is in a 



380 GERMANS THE WORST OF TRAVELLERS. 

sweat, sticking his fork or spoon into a disli after lie 
has had it in his mouth, is rarely welcome a second 
time in an English family of the class of society he 
really belongs to by birth, education, and fortune. 
When he is obliged to renounce these little practices 
not conformable to English customs, he is playing a part 
not habitual to him, assuming a refinement in society 
foreign to his usual hereditary habits ; and he hurries 
to his inn or lodgings, where he can smoke, spit, 
belch, and unbutton himself and lounge half-dressed 
in his bed-gown, and be as gross in his own company 
as he pleases. One half the coldness, haughtiness, 
and distance of manner imputed to the English, both 
at home and abroad, by German travellers and writers, 
arises fron^ this difference of refinement or taste in 
the ways of living. Excess, perhaps, there is on both 
sides ; the Englishman too delicate, refined, fastidious, 
too much of the silver fork school in his way of living 
— the German too self-indulgent, gross, and sordid 
in manners. Of the two, the habits and modes of 
living formed upon the consideration of what is due 
to others and to a man's own self-respect, are of the 
higher character, especially as they do not necessarily 
produce effeminacy. The hardihood, endurance of 
fatigue, and energy in acting, appear to belong emi- 
nently to the people who are the more refined and 
delicate in manners and ways of living. 

The watering-place season had commenced at Mu- 
nich, and all who had leisure and means were leaving 
the city. Few towns of the same moderate size enjoy 
so little of the advantages of the country. Fruit, 
even at the end of June, is scarce in the shops and 
markets ; and gooseberries, currants, and strawberries, 
are never abundant, the soil and cold raw climate do 



THE BAVARIAN TYEOL. 381 

not favour the production even of such common fruits ; 
black cherries of poor quality from the Tyrol, are the 
principal supply of fruit. We were glad to leave 
Munich and its cold cheerless sterile plain, and did not 
reach a better country until evening. A plain, carry- 
ing thin crops of rye and barley, and studded with 
dirty dwellings huddled together in villages, is spread 
before the traveller on every side except one, on which 
it is bounded by a fine outline of mountains, showing 
vast beds of winter snow in the hollows. Tegernsee 
is a rather picturesque lake, on the bank of which a 
royal chateau, the residence of the Queen-Dowager, is 
not spoilt by the frippery of the palaces at Munich ; 
it has the charm of fine natural scenery, which art 
has not attempted to improve. At Tegernsee the 
land, houses, and people, change character suddenly ; 
the crops are good, carefully cultivated, and the small 
extent of each kind of crop — not, perhaps, above an 
acre or two together of one kind — shows that here 
again the land is divided into small properties. The 
houses are of wood, are clean, in good repair, and very 
different from the dens of stone about Munich, in 
which the cattle and horses are stabled on the ground 
floor, and the people live in the lofts above them. 
Here the houses are like the Swiss, or rather like the 
Norwegian cottages, being log-houses, each standing 
by itself on the grass, and surrounded by a family of 
smaller outhouses. Timber for building, principally 
pine wood, is evidently abundant near the hills ; but 
the expense of carriage over bad roads, prevents its 
being used extensively for cottages on the plains. In 
the many wars in which the Bavarian flat country has 
been marched over by contending armies, the inha- 
bitants naturally endeavour to dwell together in vil- 



382 THE TYROL AND NORWAY. 

lages, to escape being pillaged by single marauders 
or small parties. In the hill country these scarcely 
venture to leave the high road, and the single house 
is comparatively safe. 

The similarity between the Tyrol and Norway is 
very striking. The scenery of pine forests, narrow 
glens, torrents, lakes, and mountains, and the pas- 
turage farms and small peasant estates, each with its 
detached dwelling, have the same appearance in both 
countries. The log-houses, too, the style of roof, the 
barns over the cowhouses, with a bridge up to them, 
the kind of wooden fence round the fields, the detached 
store-room on pillars, the gallery outside of the upper 
floor of the dwelling-houses, giving access to the upper 
rooms, the way even of drying the hay on poles in 
the field, are quite Scandinavian. The Tyrolese pea- 
sant himself is a counterpart of the Norwegian ; it is, 
no doubt, the identity of circumstances in the nature 
of the two countries that produces this similarity. 
Both consist of long narrow valleys, and high rocky 
mountains, abounding in pine forests, giving pas- 
turage for cattle or goats, but not adapted for sheep- 
walks, and giving but little corn land, and that scat- 
tered in patches too small to be connected in large 
farms. The climate is nearly the same, or perhaps 
worse, in the Tyrol, the general elevation of the land 
above the sea-level counteracting the difference of 
latitude, except in sheltered situations, in which the 
vine, the maize, and the productions of southern ve- 
getation grow luxuriantly. The main body of the 
land, however, is less richly covered. Is it the near 
identity of physical circumstances, or is it some original 
connection of race between the Goths who invaded the 
Roman empire, and the Scandinavians, which has pro- 



CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE COMPARED. 383 

duced the remarkable similarity in usages, dwellings, 
and appearance of the people ? Of the two popu- 
lations, which is the better off? Yines, Indian corn, 
peaches, figs, and all the finer fruits, in the lower 
valleys, and pasturage and game in the mountains, as 
well as in Norway, should turn the scale of well-being 
on the side of the Tyrolese people ; but the Norwegian 
peasant has his free constitution, his light taxation, 
his udal right to his land, his forests abounding in 
game which he is free to take without restriction 
from game laws, his fiords abounding in fish, his ready 
markets for whatever he can produce accessible by 
sea-carriage, and his good rich neighbours, Hamburgh 
and London, giving employment to the surplus popu- 
lation of the country in their ordinary honest occu- 
pations of seamen or woodcutters, instead of their 
going about, like the Tyrolese grinding music on 
barrel-organs in every market-place of Europe for a 
beggarly living. Norway has less to envy the Tyrol 
for than we might suppose from the difference of 
latitude. 

Kreut is the name of a very large watering-place 
establishment in the Bavarian Tyrol, about a day's 
journey from Munich. It was built and patronised 
by the ex-king, and contains about 100 bedrooms ; 
the water is saline, and is considered beneficial in liver 
complaints. Invalids may have goat's milk, pure 
mountain air, scenery beautiful and grand, and mo- 
derate charges ; so that on the whole it is an excellent 
watering-place for any complaint : it is well frequented. 
" People," said the landlord, " come all the way from 
Triest to the waters of Kreut;" and he might have 
added from Paris and London, for every traveller 
stopping at this half-way house between Munich and 



3S4 KREUT. INNSBRUCK. 

Innsbruck on the way to or from Italy, is put down 
in his book as a patient visiting the waters of Kreut, 
and reported to government as a proof of the in- 
creasing European celebrity of the waters. Alas for 
celebrity ! nine out of ten of the watering-place visitors 
in other parts of Europe, would be at a loss to pro- 
nounce the name of Kreut. From Kreut to Inns- 
bruck is through a delightful highland, or rather 
Norwegian, country studded with little farms and log- 
built cottages. The Aachen lake, and the pass through 
the ridge which divides the waters falling into the 
Iser from those of the Inn, are remarkably beautiful. 
Here Bavaria ends, and Austrian custom-house officers 
receive you. Many travellers complain of the vex- 
atious search and delay at the Austrian frontier cus- 
tom-houses. " Let every man," says Sir Walter Scott, 
" speak of the ferry as he finds it." Here we found 
no delay, no search ; our word was taken that we had 
no merchandise, and our fee, or douceur, was refused 
with an air of dignity. 

Innsbruck, which is the capital or chief seat of the 
provincial government of the Tyrol, is but a small 
country town, like Dumfries, situated like it on a 
rapid stream, the Inn, and surrounded by magnificent 
mountain scenery. Italian sometimes strikes your 
ear in the streets and at the table d'hote; but a corrupt 
German is still the general tongue. The inns, all the 
way from Stuttgard, are much better up stairs than 
you expect from the entrance on the ground floor. 
That is used as a coach-house or stable, and is often a 
rendezvous for all the beggars and idlers of the town. 
You mount a very unpromising open stair in this 
coach-house place, and then only you come to the real 
house, with lobby, kitchen, salle a manger , and, upon 



INNSBEUCK. HOFFER. 385 

another floor, bedrooms ; and all these are better fur- 
nished and more clean and comfortable than you 
could expect from the approach. The Goldene Adler 
at Innsbruck, is an inn of this description. There may- 
be grander inns in the town ; but it was from a window 
in the salle a manger of this inn that Andreas HofFer, 
on the loth August, 1809, addressed the Tyrolese 
peasantry, who had chosen him, as one of themselves, 
to be their leader. There is manly stuff in the cha- 
racter of the Tyrolese. When all Napoleon's personal 
doings will be but a stale and by-gone tale, the episode 
in his wars, of HofFer and the Tyrolese peasantry de- 
fending their mountain-land against the command, 
persuasion, and threats even of their own hereditary 
rulers, yet without hope or refuge, will be read by 
posterity as one of the greatest of the moral move- 
ments of our times. That old spirit of loyalty and 
self-devotion to a cause deserted even by their own 
government, would have been thought extinct in our 
calculating reflective times, if HofFer and these Tyrolese 
peasants had not shown that it still was burning 
vigorously in their country. It is very doubtful 
whether it would be advisable and wise, even if it 
were possible, to eradicate all the prejudices of a 
people, such as their nationality, loyalty, attachment 
to established opinions and forms. All public virtue, 
patriotism, self-devotion for the common good, all that 
men admire and in heart respond to as disinterested 
and great, is born and bred, cradled and nourished, in 
such prejudices. Eradicate nationality, loyalty, war, 
religious dissent, commercial competition, and with 
much undeniable evil you would certainly eradicate 
much more good than evil in the moral character 
of man. 

c c 



386 INNSBRUCK LANDECK. — MALS. 

Switzerland has no doubt many more show points 
than the Tyrol ; but glaciers and mountains with per- 
petual snow, are the wonders of Nature, not her 
beauties. The traveller, after seeing both countries, 
would rather return to the Tyrol. The inhabitants, 
too, are more in accordance with the scenery of their 
land than the Swiss. The peasant of the Tyrol, in 
his own land, not the music-grinder, is of bold manly 
bearing, a man in every sense, with the impress of an 
open natural character in every look and gesture. 
The Swiss have been too long the ready servants of 
whoever will pay them, and want the appearance of 
self-respect and of the capability of elevated sentiment. 

From Innsbruck to Landeck (which is a day's jour- 
ney for a voiturier's horses, and from Landeck to Mais, 
which is another, and from Mais to Meran, a third) is 
the most picturesque and interesting route of three 
days' easy travelling, which Europe offers to the tra- 
veller. The gorge dividing the sources of the Inn 
from those of the Adige, the Finstermunz pass, is con- 
sidered the most picturesque of all the passes in the 
Alpine range. But who can describe scenery? Words 
do not, like colours, convey the same ideas of natural 
scenery to every mind. Description of scenery is 
painting in the dark. On this route the traveller 
descends, in a few hours, from naked rock with patches 
of last year's snow, and from grazing, or rather browz- 
ing, land for goats and cows, and spots of rye or oats 
— the vegetation of a northern latitude — to wheat, 
Indian corn, chestnut-trees, fig-trees, almond-trees, 
vines ; in short, ten degrees of latitude would make 
no greater difference in climate and vegetation than a 
descent of a few hours, with a drag-chain on the 
wheels, in the Tyrol. 

Meran is a little ancient town, once the residence of 



MERAN SCENERY PEOPLE. 387 

the princes of the Tyrol, standing at the junction of a 
small river with the Adige, both rapid mountain tor- 
rents, and with some remains of towers and castles 
on the heights around it. These ancient works, the 
bridge, the monasteries, the antique streets of this 
out-of-the-way little capital, the primitive air about 
the inhabitants and their dwellings, and the fine ath- 
letic peasantry, in dresses very picturesque and of 
bright colours, make Meran a singularly interesting 
place. New things, and the spirit and fashion of 
modern times, seem not to have penetrated to Meran. 
Monks and priests, and peasants with gay-coloured 
doublets and leathern girdles, appear like an ancient 
race of men returned from the fourteenth century, to 
show themselves to the nineteenth. A fine idea it 
gives, too, of the old times, of the frank manly bear- 
ing of men to each other, and of the jolly substantial 
way of living. The peasant sits with his quart mug 
of wine before him, at the door of the public-house, 
not tippling for the sake of drinking — it is not in the 
wine to make such hale athletic fellows tipsy — but 
for the sake of conversation and jollity. The eating 
is as abundant as the drinking. There is an air of 
plenty about the people ; and no wonder, for their 
country, the valley of the Adige about Meran, is a 
garden shut in by mountain walls from every perni- 
cious blast, and open to the sunshine ; and in this 
favoured spot, being a border spot between South 
and North, the luxuriancy of southern vegetation is 
united to the freshness of the northern ; the land is 
not dried up, parched, and toasted to a brown crust, 
as the earth is in southern countries ; but is green and 
bright, and as well covered as northern lands are in a 
fine summer ; yet it carries maize, vines, almonds, 

c c 2 



388 THE TYROL SCENERY PEOPLE 

chestnuts, mulberries, and all the fine fruits of the 
South. The vines are not like the vines in France or 
on the Rhine, cut to the size and shape of gooseberry- 
bushes, by which the vineyard is not more picturesque 
or agreeable to the eye than a turnip-field. Here the 
vines are trained over trellises, sometimes over the 
high road itself for half a mile, so that you travel 
under a kind of arcade, in a chequered shade of leaves. 
A whole vineyard of some acres is raised as high as a 
man, on trellises, the roots and stem of the vine alone 
being at the ground ; and between the stems, under 
the roof of the leaves, a crop of Indian corn is raised, 
and the land is bearing two crops at once, one of 
grapes overhead, and one of grain on the ground. 
The eye takes in, at one glance, the perpetual snow, 
the bare peak, the stunted vegetation of the high 
mountain, the gradually increasing green downwards, 
and the full vegetation, at last, of rich-leaved fig-trees, 
chestnut-trees, Indian corn, vines, and all the luxu- 
riance of southern vegetation at its base. A lane 
near Meran, covered over like an arcade by trellises 
with vines giving a speckled shade on the ground and 
a cool obscurity, while all without was burning in 
sunshine, afforded a noonday walk not to be forgotten. 
The peasantry of the Tyrol are not the least pictu- 
resque of the objects in the landscape. Their dress is 
rich and gay, and each district seems to have its own 
hereditary fashion. About Innsbruck the hat is with- 
out brim, tall, and in shape like a flowerpot inverted, 
and is ornamented with several bands of bright-co- 
loured ribbons, and generally with a bunch of flowers 
or a green sprig. About Mais and Meran immensely 
broad-brimmed felt hats are universally worn ; and 
bright green vests with many rows of buttons, and 



COSTUME. PURE AND MIXED RACES. 389 

broad leather waist-girdles, knee breeches, stockings, 
and shoes with silver buckles, display to advantage 
their remarkably well made feet, legs, and athletic 
limbs. The dress is worn by the whole population ; 
none, on a market-day, seems poorer or inferior. 
They are evidently, by their frank, manly, indepen- 
dent bearing, a population of small peasant proprie- 
tors ; a set of hearty, jolly, open, independent yeomen, 
such as we have not even the shadow of in England 
or Scotland, and with very little extreme want or real 
poverty among them. The Austrian government may 
be bad and oppressive, but it evidently suits this 
people well. 

This fine race of people must be a mixed breed. 
Their country, from the earliest invasion of Italy by 
the Goths in the fourth century, has been marched 
over, encamped in, and colonised or settled in, by 
every army of every country. It is, perhaps, to this 
mixture of races that the fine development of the 
physical powers of the human animal in this country, 
may be ascribed. To cross the breed is apparently 
the law of improvement in all animals — in man as 
well as in cattle. The Celts, the Germans, the old 
races of men, become decrepit and feeble in propor- 
tion to the purity of their descent. The Laplander 
is their type. He is probably of the most ancient, 
and certainly of the least mixed, of the European 
races. The same cause which has produced the dimi- 
nutive horse of the Shetland Isles — the breeding in 
and in, as jockeys term it — the want of any admixture 
of other kinds, has produced the diminutive Laplander, 
and possibly the cretinism and other hereditary ten- 
dencies to deterioration in the secluded valleys of the 
Alps, in which strangers never settle, and where the 

c c 3 



390 B0LSAN0. — THE MODE OF DEFENDING 

inhabitants intermarry among themselves from gene- 
ration to generation. The mixed breeds of Celts and 
Saxons in England and the Lowlands of Scotland, are 
among the most powerful men in Europe, physically 
and intellectually. The pure breed, the native High- 
lander, Welshman, Irishman, is weaker and smaller. 
Races, as well as languages, are improved by admix- 
ture. 

From Meran, following the Adige, the traveller 
comes to Botzen or Bolsano. In the days of the com- 
mercial prosperity of Venice, this was an important 
town, to which merchants from the North of Europe 
came to purchase the products of the East at its fairs. 
It is still a busy little place, with a great deal of 
cooper-work going on in it. In wine countries, the 
cooper's trade is always one of the most flourishing 
handicrafts, employing many people at all seasons. 
The wines of the valley of the Adige are pleasant, 
subacid, light wines ; but tasting too much of the fruit 
for English palates. 

The river occasionally overwhelms the land with a 
flood, carrying gravel over the soil and entirely de- 
stroying considerable tracts which before had been 
covered with an exuberant vegetation. This seems 
the misery, counterbalancing the happiness, of this 
fruitful valley. The river runs with such rapidity 
that, although navigable up to Solum, between Bot- 
zen and Trent five horses are used to drag a small 
lioht boat against the current. The abrasion of the 
banks of soft soils by the stream, is an evil to which 
all alluvial land is exposed. An ingenious idea, al- 
though roughly executed, was in operation here, for 
preventing the current of the river from undermining 
and wearing away the banks of clay or loam. It is 



RIVER-BANKS FROM ABRASION. 391 

the upper edge or surface of the waters of a torrent 
that abrades the banks containing it. The current at 
sixteen or twenty inches below the surface of the 
stream, does little or no injury to the bank, and it is 
only when the stream is rising or falling that damage 
is done to the bank at a higher or lower level. A long- 
train of wooden troughs, like those of a common mili- 
lead, only boarded over on the top, was anchored to 
the bottom close to the banks, and was sunk by stones 
on the lid or top, by which it floated so deep in the 
stream that about sixteen inches in depth of the sur- 
face-water of the current passed through it, without 
touching the bank. The train of troughs being an- 
chored with a sufficient length of chain, rose or fell 
with the rise or fall of the water of the torrent, and 
always took off the upper edge of the current to the 
depth of sixteen inches from the surface, and prevented 
it from coming in contact with the natural bank and 
abrading it, either by its friction or by the pressure 
of the main body of the stream against it. The idea 
appeared to me simple, just, and applicable to many 
situations on mountain-streams and lakes in Scotland 
in which Haugh-lands, or the fertile flat spots of allu- 
vial land on the borders of the water, have often to be 
defended with piles or bulwarks of stone, against the 
abrasion or undermining of the banks, and generally 
with little effect. 

Does it belong to the ridiculous or the sublime, 
to the meanness or the greatness of human destiny, 
that a large proportion of our race are occupied all 
their lives in breeding, feeding, and tending a very 
ugly disagreeable worm, and spinning and weaving 
its excrement into ornamental clothing ? The culti- 
vation of silk appears to have some kind of connection 

c c 4 



392 SILK CULTURE AND PAUPERISM. 

with the condition of the people. The traveller the 
least observant must be struck on entering Italy, 
either from the Tyrol or from Switzerland, with the 
sudden change in the appearance of the people in the 
silk-producing country. Bolsano appears to be a di- 
viding point in coming by the Tyrol into Italy, be- 
tween a stout, well-clothed, well-off peasantry, and a 
poor sickly-looking population living in rags and ap- 
parent misery. Why should there be such a contrast 
between the apparent condition of the people of the 
upper and lower parts of the valley of the Adige ? 
The soil is as good, the climate as good, and the go- 
vernment the same. This point of Bolsano seems to 
divide the peasantry who live by husbandry on their 
own estates, from those who live by the culture of silk, 
either on their own account or for a landlord. It is 
evident, whatever be the reason, that poverty and the 
silkworm dwell together. Why should this be so ? 

The raising of silk is rather a manufacturing than 
an agricultural operation. The planting, rearing, and 
taking care of the mulberry-trees, the plucking and 
carrying home of the leaves daily at the proper season, 
are all that properly belong to husbandry in the pro- 
cess. By the temporary employment given in feeding, 
tending, and managing all the non-agricultural work 
connected with the business, before the cocoons are fit 
for sale, a greater population than the land requires 
or can employ in its cultivation, is called into existence. 
They must depend upon a few weeks' work for a twelve- 
month's subsistence. An additional value also is given 
to land by this valuable product, raised, as far as the 
land is connected with it, merely by keeping mulberry- 
trees on the farm ; and this great secondary value 
makes land dear to those who would acquire land 



SILK CULTURE AND PAUPERISM. 393 

merely to live on it by husbandry, and not to enter 
into the silk-raising trade. Raising silk also is a kind 
of lottery. The expenses of labour, fuel, transport, 
attendance, and of large premises of various kinds, are 
great and certain ; but the price paid to the producer 
for his cocoons or raw silk is very variable, and his 
own success in rearing the worms is precarious. Such 
lottery-gains unsettle steady habits of industry and 
real thrift, and seldom add to the prosperity of the in- 
dividual or well-being of a community. The popula- 
tion of wine-growing districts is, for this reason, always 
the poorest in Europe ; and it is almost proverbial 
that the owner of olive-trees never thrives. We see, 
even at home, that farmers who are fishermen, fish- 
curers, manufacturers, or even cattle-dealers or corn- 
merchants, seldom make both branches of employment 
answer. The lottery of great gains without corre- 
sponding industry, is not favourable to the habits of 
the class or of the individual. The state of landed 
property is also different in silk-producing districts. 
The valuable product requires large premises and oc- 
casionally many hands, for breeding, feeding, cleaning, 
and tending the worms and storing the cocoons, and 
for carrying on the production of silk on a great scale. 
Spacious buildings, like the largest of our cotton fac- 
tories, stud the face of the country, for carrying on 
this business, and show that great capital and much 
competition exist ; and the tendency is necessarily to 
bring the land into estates held from the silk pro- 
ducers or mortgaged to them, and bound to the silk 
culture. Whatever may be the cause, the contrast is 
very striking, on crossing the Alps and descending 
from Switzerland or the Tyrol to the silk-producing 
country on the Italian side. 



394 CHURCH OF ROME THE SOURCE OF 

The traveller who has no partiality for Popery or 
Puseyism, and holds shaven crowns or shovel-hats, 
altars, crucifixes, and surplices, white or black, of 
silk or of serge, not very essential to salvation, or very 
worthy distinctions among Christian ministers, will 
yet look with a certain reverence and respect upon the 
pomp, pageantry, and magnificence of the once uni- 
versal Church of Rome — these relics of her former 
power and grandeur still displayed in her religious 
ceremonials and machinery. He cannot forget that 
there was a time, extending over some fifteen or six- 
teen hundred years, when Europe contained only 
slaves and masters, serfs and nobles, and the Church- 
men were the only third estate in the social body. 
They were not men of birth, privilege, or interest. 
The highest dignities and the greatest social and poli- 
tical influence were attainable in the Catholic Church, 
by men of the lowest as well as of the highest classes ; 
and individuals rose to eminence and power by worth, 
talents, and learning. This Church-element was, in the 
early middle ages, the popular element in the social 
structure of Europe ; the counterpoise to the kingly 
and aristocratic elements. In any true reading of 
history, the Church and her establishments, dependent 
upon the papal authority at Rome alone, and indepen- 
dent in their civil as well as their ecclesiastical affairs, 
of the sovereigns, nobles, feudal jurisdictions and in- 
stitutions, and of the military anarchy and violence 
prevailing in every land, were the only asylums in 
which the spirit of freedom and of independence of 
mind, and the restraints of public opinion and reli- 
gious feeling upon barbarian chiefs and men in power, 
the moral checks upon brutal despotic sway, were 
lodged, kept alive, and nursed to their present matu- 



LIBERTY AND CIVILISATION IN EUROPE. 395 

rity. Rome would have been what Constantinople is, 
and western Europe what Turkey and Russia are, but 
for the separation of the ecclesiastical from the tem- 
poral authority in every country of the Catholic faith, 
and the independence of this distinct Church power 
of the power of the state, its concentration in a sove- 
reign pontiff at Rome, and its being upheld, not by 
arms and brute force, but by public opinion and a 
moral and religious sentiment or faith, allied, no doubt, 
to gross superstition, but still much more spiritual 
and intellectual than any other social influence of the 
times. Law, learning, education, science, all that we 
term civilisation in the present social condition of the 
European people, spring from the supremacy of the 
Roman pontiffs and the Catholic priesthood over the 
kings and nobles of the middle ages. All that men 
have of civil, political, and religious freedom in the 
present age, may be clearly traced, in the history of 
every country, to the working and effects of the inde- 
pendent power of the Church of Rome over the pro- 
perty, social economy, movement, mind, and intelli- 
gence of all connected with her in the social body. 
She unquestionably represented the public mind in 
all social action ; and if she often abused her power as 
its representative, she always maintained the rights of 
her constituent to independence of the civil power, or 
state, in matters of religion. By nursing this spirit 
in the European people, the Church of Rome was her- 
self the mother of the Reformation. It was the le<ri- 
timate offspring of her own principle of existence. 
Without this spirit and principle of independence of 
the civil power in religious affairs, the efforts of Luther, 
Calvin, and Knox, would have been unavailing with 
the people in establishing the Reformation ; and the 



396 COMMON PRINCIPLE OP THE PREE CHURCH 

Free Church of Scotland shakes hands with the Church 
of Rome over this one great social and religious prin- 
ciple common to both — the independence of religious 
faith of all state power. Let no man contemn the 
Church of Rome as having been, from beginning to 
end of its history and social influence, a noxious or 
useless establishment. In the Greek Church no such 
reformation as Luther's can take place ; because no 
such independence of the civil power as the Roman 
pontiffs claimed, made good, and infused in the mind 
and spirit of the people of western Europe, was ever 
conceded to, or inculcated by the patriarchs of the 
Greek branch of Christianity. We read history wrong 
when we swell with indignation at the arrogance, 
pride, and almost royal pomp, wealth, and power of 
the prelates in the middle ages, at the disposal of 
crowns and kingdoms, and at the humiliation and de- 
thronement of legitimate sovereigns in the plenitude 
of their power, by papal decrees. We forget that 
these events, so common in the middle ages, were the 
subjugation of brute force, in barbarous times, to spi- 
ritual and intellectual influences in social affairs. Su- 
perstition, fanaticism, religious action of any kind, 
however unenlightened, degrading, and barbarous, is 
still intellectual influence, is still moral movement, 
however ill understood and ill directed, is still some- 
thing higher and better than the mere submission to 
blind force — is something that exalts the man above 
the mere animal-serf or slave, responding, without 
reference to his intellectual nature, to the mere im- 
pulse of the command and the lash. The despotism of 
the East is founded on the union of the spiritual and 
civil power in the same hand, on the subjection of soul 
and body to the state-ruler. If the sovereigns of 



OF SCOTLAND AND THE CHURCH OF ROME. 397 

western Europe had been heads of the Church as well 
as of the state, civil and religious liberty would have 
been extinguished, and with it all civilisation. His- 
torians declaim against the inordinate ambition of 
popes and prelates, and the wonderful continuity of 
effort of all Churchmen in all countries, century after 
century, to obtain more and more power and influ- 
ence for the Church and its head at Rome ; but they 
forget that such ambition and effort would have been 
altogether fruitless, if not supported by some great so- 
cial necessity, by some generally and strongly felt con- 
viction in the minds of all men, that this power was 
beneficial to them in their social state, protective of 
their temporal interests and civil rights, and not 
merely beneficial to the order of clergy. An obscure 
impulse, a kind of instinct, leads men to support what 
is for their general social good, although the mode of 
its operating may not be clear to every mind. It was 
this instinctive impulse of the human mind to adopt 
the fitting and the good, and not merely a blind fana- 
ticism or superstition raised by the clergy, that led 
every intelligent man, in those dark ages of despotism 
and anarchy, to side with the Church and to set up 
and support her power in every country, above and 
independent of the absolute uncontrolled power of 
physical force involved in the military feudality of 
the sovereign and nobles. We see, at this day, the 
want of such a third power in the social structure of 
some of the Protestant countries of the Continent. 
Those which had not, like England, Switzerland, and 
Holland, obtained some form of an effective constitu- 
tional government, or some general feeling in favour 
of it, before the Reformation, fell back, by the junction 
of Church and state in the hands of the sovereign, into 



398 UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE ADVERSE 

a lower condition as to civil and political liberty and 
rights than they were in before. Sweden, Denmark, 
Prussia, and all the Protestant states of Germany are, 
at this day, in all that regards freedom in social ac- 
tion, freedom of mind and opinion, more enslaved than 
they were in the middle of the middle ages. The 
union of Church and state has established an irrespon- 
sible power in the hands of the sovereigns adverse to 
civil and religious liberty. This is clearly brought out 
by the different position of the Protestant and Catho- 
lic clergy in those countries. In Sweden and Denmark 
there are few or no Catholic clergy ; but the established 
Lutheran clergy are employed as government-func- 
tionaries and overloaded with statistical returns, in- 
quiries, and local business in their parishes which, 
however necessary to the state, are incompatible with 
the pastoral duties of the clergyman. The Roman 
Catholic priesthood would not submit, in any country, 
to such abuse of their time and proper functions. In 
Prussia, the two branches of Protestantism, the Lu- 
theran and Calvinistic Churches, were squeezed into 
one a few years ago by the late sovereign. New forms 
of worship were imposed upon them by royal edict ; 
coercion, imprisonment, military force, and quartering 
of troops on the recusant peasants, were resorted to, 
in order to force the ministers and people to receive 
the new service ; and to resist this monstrous tyranny 
and persecution there was no Rome, no Vatican, no 
pope or head of the Church to appeal to. How dif- 
ferent, in the same country, at the same period, was 
the exertion of the autocratic power of the same 
Prussian monarch over his Roman Catholic subjects ! 
They had protection at Rome, and consequently in 
the whole Catholic world, against such arbitrary vio- 



TO LIBERTY IN PROTESTANT COUNTRIES. 399 

lence to the religious convictions and Church of his 
Catholic subjects. He could not even appoint to any 
clerical office independently of Rome, although he 
could, and actually did, imprison and dismiss Protes- 
tant clergymen, for refusing to adopt a new Church 
service which, as head of the Church and state, he 
composed and promulgated by royal edict. 

Whoever considers impartially the historical events 
of ancient and recent times, will admit that the Church 
of Rome was, for many a dark age and hour, a beacon- 
light in the path of civil and religious liberty, shining 
far a-head through the universal gloom ; and although 
now it is left far behind in the progress of mind and 
of society, and is dimmed by the rising dawn of know- 
ledge and of civilisation, it is still useful, it still shows 
to arbitrary kingly power in Prussia, that there are 
restraints upon tyrannical interference with religious 
opinion and convictions. 

The influence of the religious persecutions of the 
late king of Prussia in producing the general move- 
ment of Germany, in 1848, for constitutional govern- 
ment to limit such arbitrary acts of autocratic power, 
will be touched upon in a future Note. The attempt, 
by a Concordat with the pope, to bring the Catholic 
subjects of Prussia into some ostensible connection 
with, and subjection to, the head of the Protestant 
Church, and its total failure, is curious and instruc- 
tive. It was not to be tolerated in an autocratic go- 
vernment that the sovereign who could, as head of 
the Church and state, impose a new liturgy and 
Church service on his Protestant subjects, and appoint 
or dismiss, reward or punish their clergy at his plea- 
sure, could not even name a priest to a vacant dignity 
or office among his Roman Catholic subjects. A Con- 



400 THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT. 

cordat with the late pope was therefore attempted, in 
order to give an equivalent power to the crown over 
its Catholic subjects. 

If governments can be taught by example, the ex- 
ample of Prussia in this attempt at the settlement of 
a Concordat with the Vatican might be a useful lesson, 
a warning against the gratuitous interference of a 
state with objects of Church power, nowise connected 
with the legitimate objects of good government. To 
have no State-Church at all appears to be the only 
arrangement suitable to the present advanced condi- 
tion of society and of the public mind on religious 
freedom. 

The population of Prussia, like that of Britain, is 
mixed — Protestant and Catholic — in the proportion 
of about 5 Catholics to 8 Protestants. The total popu- 
lation of Prussia is 14,098,125 persons; of whom 
8,604,748 are Protestants, 5,294,003 are Catholics; 
and Jews, Baptists, and a few Greeks, make up the 
balance. This proportion of Catholics is greater than 
in the United Kingdoms. In several provinces of 
Prussia the majority of inhabitants are Catholic, in 
others Protestant ; but in none are the people exclu- 
sively Catholic or Protestant. The admixture of 
Catholics and Protestants in the population is similar 
to that in Ireland. By the division of the Continent 
among the allied powers, after the peace of Paris, 
Prussia obtained several important districts on the 
Khine, of which the majority of the population was 
Catholic. A new division of the Prussian territories 
into Eoman Catholic dioceses, with a suitable provi- 
sion for bishops and cathedral-chapters, and an agree- 
ment of the government with the pope on these sub- 
jects, was thought necessary, although the necessity 



THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT. 401 

was not very apparent ; the Catholic Church arrange* 
ments being carried on without any reference to the 
state, or any agreement between the pope and the 
government, in the same way as in other countries of 
mixed population, as in America, Holland, England, 
Ireland, Scotland, in which Catholic and Protestant 
inhabitants live intermixed, with an equal protection 
of law for property, whether private or ecclesiastical, 
and an equal liberty to form and follow their own re- 
ligious opinions, and to make suitable arrangements 
for them. It was, however, in the religious frenzy of 
the Prussian ruler considered necessary, for the re- 
storation of Europe to its old social and political con- 
dition, to renew all the old ties with Rome which had 
been forgotten by the existing generation, and the 
celebrated Niebuhr was sent to the Vatican to nego- 
tiate a concordat with the pope. After long delay, 
this business was brought to a conclusion in 1820, 
and the concordat — the first between a Protestant 
sovereign and the pope — was signed by the king of 
Prussia, in the June of that year. Pius VII. issued a 
bull in July 1821, in the Latin and German languages, 
for the establishment, provision, and diocesan bound- 
aries of Catholic archbishoprics and bishoprics in the 
Prussian kingdom, and which the king, by a cabinet 
edict of August of the same year, ordered to be for- 
mally proclaimed in his dominions. This bull, like 
others, is usually known and quoted by the Latin 
words it begins with, viz. u De salute animarum" The 
Roman Catholic Church in the Prussian dominions 
received by this bull, two archbishoprics and six 
bishoprics, of which the territorial limits of jurisdic- 
tion were defined. The endowment for the two arch- 
bishops of Cologne and Posen, and for the bishop of 

D D 



402 THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT. 

Breslau, was fixed at 12,000 Thalers each (about 
1650/. sterling), and for each of the other bishops 
8000 (about 1100/. sterling). The incomes of the 
inferior dignitaries of the Church in cathedrals and 
chapters, were fixed at from 800 to 1200 Thalers, or 
110/. to 160/. sterling. With regard to the appoint- 
ment to the highest ecclesiastical dignities the chapter 
elected, with the concurrence of the Crown in the per- 
son elected by the chapter ; and by a papal brief the 
different chapters were enjoined to elect only such 
persons to the episcopal seats as were agreeable to the 
king. In the event of the king and chapter not agree- 
ing as to the person elected, it does not appear how 
such a very possible dispute is to be settled, or whe- 
ther the government has a veto on the appointment of 
an agitating prelate who might be troublesome or 
dangerous. The question is left as unsettled in this 
concordat as it was in the middle ages. The appoint- 
ments to the chapters, or body of deans, prebendaries, 
and cathedral clergy, who are the electors to the epi- 
scopal seats, are vested in the pope, in the months of 
January, March, May, July, September, and Novem- 
ber; and in the other six months the stalls falling 
vacant are to be filled by the bishop of the diocese, 
but with the approval of the sovereign. In these sti- 
pulations the Church has clearly the lion's share of 
the patronage. The electors of the bishops, the chap- 
ter, are appointed half by the pope, without any re- 
ference to the approval of the government ; the other 
half by the bishop of the diocese, or, in other words, 
by the pope's substitute, with a reference, indeed, to 
the approval of government, but with no disqualifica- 
tion from non-approval, and no veto on an unsuitable 
appointment. This body of electors choose the bishop, 



THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT. 40o 

and are enjoined to elect only a person agreeable to 
the king. But there is no veto, no check upon the 
appointment of the bishops by this body of electors, 
laid down to protect the government from agitating 
bishops or bishops not agreeable to the king. The 
Prussian concordat is often mentioned, even by our 
members of parliament, as an instance of a Protestant 
government negotiating an agreement with the head 
of the Roman Catholic Church on ecclesiastical affairs, 
especially on the appointment of the clergy, and as a 
model for a similar arrangement or concordat with the 
pope for the Catholic Church in Ireland. But this 
Prussian concordat is an agreement in which nothing 
is agreed upon in those points on which ecclesiastical 
power and civil power require the strictest adjustment 
and most defined limits, to avoid collision and social 
discord. They are left as open and vague as if it had 
been a transaction with the Vatican in the middle ages. 
The concordat of the late king of Prussia is practi- 
cally, as to the ecclesiastical and civil power, the same 
as that of Henry II. of England with the papal autho- 
rity, after the death of a Becket. Before the end of the 
year in which this bull De salute animarum was pro- 
mulgated, the archbishopric of Cologne and the bishop- 
rics of Treves, Paderborn, and Munster were declined, 
no doubt by secret orders from Rome, by the ecclesi- 
astics whom the Crown wished to appoint to those 
dignities. The archbishopric of Cologne was at last 
filled, in 1825, and with an additional endowment 
amounting to about 30,000 Thalers, or 4000/. a year, 
a residence, and other benefits. But, in spite of these 
soothing appliances, the spirit of the Catholic Church 
broke out on a point which the concordat ought to 
have adjusted and settled, and which it left unnoticed. 

D D 2 



404 THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT. PAPAL 

In mixed marriages, that is, the marriage of a Catholic 
with a Protestant, a case unavoidably of frequent oc- 
currence in a mixed population, the Catholic clergy 
introduced a general rule that all the children must 
be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, otherwise 
the Catholic parent is to be deprived of all the Church 
ordinances and consolations considered essential, in 
the Catholic belief, to salvation. This was made a 
matter of conscience with the priests, and firmly in- 
sisted on ; but it was an apple of discord in all social 
relations and families of a mixed population, and it 
was against the laws of the kingdom to impose such 
restrictions upon the parties to be married. It was a 
grievous oppression on parents who were married and 
had children, and was evidently not merely an en- 
croachment upon, but must be, in the course of time, 
an extinction of, the Protestant religion in Protestant 
Prussia. This apple was the first fruit of the con- 
cordat by which an acknowledged status was given to 
the Roman Catholic Church in a Protestant country # , 
without any adjustment of this point on which the 
conscientious discharge of the Catholic priestly duties 
was incompatible with a Protestant government. The 
concordat appears to have purposely avoided any set- 
tlement of this question, which must necessarily arise 
in a country in which two distinct and antagonistic 
Churches are equally state Churches. The state may 
adopt one or the other, the Catholic or the Protestant, 
to be the state Church, or may more reasonably adopt 
neither, and have no state Church ; but the state can- 

* Pius VIII. issued a Brief, of 25th March, 1830, prohibiting the Ca- 
tholic clergy in the western provinces of Prussia from celebrating mixed 
marriages, without the promise of the parties to educate all their children 
in the Catholic faith. 



INTERFERENCE IN MIXED MARRIAGES. 405 

not connect itself with two so different, and in social 
action, influence, and interference with private life so 
distinct, and in the principle of such interference so 
opposed, establishments as the Protestant and Catho- 
lic Churches, without rnisgovernment and a perpetual 
oscillation according to the temporary whim of its 
rulers, and without sanctioning a grievous oppression, 
either on the freedom of religion and the domestic 
peace of families, or on the conscience of the priest. 
Where the Roman Catholic Church has no status, is 
no endowed state Church, as in America or in Great 
Britain or Ireland, this claim of the Roman Catholic 
priests to the religious education of all the children 
born in mixed marriages, is dormant. It was not 
heard of in Prussia until after their establishment 
and endowment as a state-supported Church, and 
their independence of their flocks for their means 
of living. The religious education of the children in 
mixed marriages was a matter of private agreement 
between the parents, as it is now in America, Ireland, 
England, and other mixed Catholic and Protestant 
countries. A voluntarily supported Churchman, what- 
ever be his Church, must respect the social rights of 
those who support him. He must marry, baptize, 
confess, administer sacraments, bury, and perform all 
religious duties, without any conditions that are not 
purely religious, without conditions interfering with 
the rights of parents in their own domestic arrange- 
ments and family affairs, such as the religious educa- 
tion of children of mixed marriages. In a voluntarily 
supported Church, the priest refusing to perforin the 
offices of the Church without those conditions — a re- 
fusal which now embitters the happiness of domestic 
life in a great part of Prussia — would have no con- 

D D 3 



406 THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT. INTERFERENCE 

gregation or support. Other priests would be more 
accommodating, and the claim could not be enforced 
by religious compulsion. The embodied, connected, 
and endowed priesthood stands on a very different 
footing as to social power and interference from that 
of single unconnected priests in a country with no 
state Church. 

The common law of Prussia, as of all the Continen- 
tal states, prohibits extraordinary assemblages of the 
people under any pretext, political or religious. All 
religious meetings, even for prayer in private houses, 
are interdicted to Protestants in the Prussian domi- 
nions, and the parties punished by fine and imprison- 
ment. With more reason pilgrimages to shrines at 
the distance of more than a day's journey, were pro- 
hibited, as a crowd of both sexes lodged promiscuously 
on these pious journeyings, and scenes of the greatest 
profligacy and indecency occurred among a multitude 
of the ignorant and idle just relieved, or about to be re- 
lieved, from all their past sins. But, according to the 
interpretation of the concordat by the Catholic clergy, 
the state had no longer a right to interfere with pil- 
grimages or religious processions. The Church only 
could interfere with the Catholic service in these 
branches of it ; and, no doubt, by the concordat the 
state could not prevent them. The pilgrimage of a 
million and a half of people to the Holy Coat at Treves, 
in 1845, had its political meaning, and was, in reality, 
a defiance to government from the Church. The Prus- 
sian government did not, and under its concordat 
with the pope could not, interfere to put down a scan- 
dal dangerous to the public peace, hurtful to the morals 
of the people, and in direct contravention of the law 
of the land. The pope, or the Catholic Church in 



WITH THE LAW IN PILGRIMAGES AND PROCESSIONS. 407 

Prussia, did not disavow the proceedings of the eccle- 
siastics at Treves who called out this illegal monster- 
meeting. There are no Orangemen fortunately in 
Protestant Prussia, or the state would have had to re- 
press a war of processions, as the fruit of a concordat 
which admitted a power above the law of the country. 
It was not an equality of rights with the Lutheran 
and Calvinistic Churches that was granted by the 
Prussian government through this concordat, but a 
power was conceded to the Koman Catholic Church 
to do, without control of the state, what was danger- 
ous to the public peace in a population of mixed re- 
ligions, and what the Protestant part of the commu- 
nity would not be allowed by the common law and 
police of the land to do. It was not freedom of re- 
ligion and the abolition of all state Church connection ; 
but it was a second state Church that was established 
by the concordat, and one which enters, in its reli- 
gious requirements, too much into the relations of so- 
ciety, to exist with full Catholic power and rights as a 
state Church by the side of any branch of Protestant- 
ism, or in a liberally constituted government. It is 
not in mixed marriages only, or in processions, pil- 
grimages, and matters of faith, that the ecclesiastical 
power of the Church of Rome cannot be combined so 
as to work smoothly with the civil power in Protes- 
tant countries. There are various points affecting 
property, on which the two powers cannot co-exist. 
Persons in certain degrees of affinity to each other — 
as first cousins, or even of spiritual affinity only as 
sponsors, or godfathers and godmothers, for the same 
infant, or who have taken the ecclesiastical vows in 
any religious community — cannot marry without 
express dispensation ; and their progeny, without 

D D 4 



408 THE PRUSSIAN CONCORDAT. 

such dispensation for the marriage, would be illegiti- 
mate, and incapable of inheriting, according to the 
tenets of the Roman Catholic Church and the law 
of Catholic lands ; and if by a concordat that Church is 
made a state Church as well as the Protestant Church, 
it would be very unjust that the property of the Ca- 
tholic population should be regulated in questions of 
succession, by Protestant law which admits none of 
those disabilities to marriage. These are difficulties 
which no concordat can adjust ; because the Church 
of Rome brings from the darker ages an interference 
in the civil affairs and relations of society as a religi- 
ous right and duty of its priesthood, and which, how- 
ever useful in the ages in which this power arose, is 
inconsistent now with the peace and good govern- 
ment of the social body in constitutional countries. 
In a country like Prussia without the complicated 
rights and interests connected with a mass of pro- 
perty invested in commerce and manufactures, and 
governed by different laws in different provinces, and 
by an arbitrary autocratic power above all law, many 
very ill-judged measures may be adopted ; but these 
are not models to be followed by countries, like 
Britain or America, in a much higher social state. 



FRANKFORT. 409 



CHAP. XVI. 

notes on frankfort in spring 1849. the german parliament 

— st. paul's church — the members — proportion from the 

different states proportion from the different classes 

and interests. — the club system. — the club regulations. 

the members representatives only of their clubs, not 

of the german people. — club opinion not the genuine 
public opinion. — club regime introduced into english 

legislation by the corn-law league its danger. the 

club-parliament of frankfort its waste of time its 

frivolous discussions. — cause of the failure of the 

frankfort parliament the neglect of the religious 

element. the movement of 1848 ln germany traced to 

the suppression by the king of prussia of the lutheran 
and calvlnistic churches, and of ronge's german catholic 
church. — policy, conduct, and character of the late 
king of prussia. 

Frankfort is one of the handsomest towns in Ger- 
many; its streets wide, the houses spacious, and a 
movement of people, carts, and carriages seldom seen 
on the Continent in towns of moderate population. 
Frankfort contains about 60,000 inhabitants, and has 
more the appearance of a bustling English town, such 
as Oxford or Bath, than of a dull inanimate German 
city. Berlin, compared to it, is but a row of empty 
barracks on each side of empty streets, without a 
moving being in many of them, but a solitary sentinel 
on his post. Here there is a perpetual stir and bus- 
tle, yet there are no manufactures. Frankfort is the 
centre of the money transactions of a great part of 
Europe, is a great depot of goods bought, sold, or ex- 
changed at her fairs ; and, although not a manufac- 



410 FKANKFORT. 

turing nor a commercial city importing and exporting 
on its own account, and without any apparent advan- 
tage in its situation, is one of the most opulent cities 
in Germany. There are all the indications of an 
opulent class living in Frankfort ; carriages, horses, 
servants, and a belt of villas, country-seats, and gar- 
dens around the town. Yet the people of the labour- 
ing class seem not to partake in this opulence. They 
are but poorly clad in coarse home-made woollen or 
linen stuffs, and wooden clogs are worn by labouring 
people instead of shoes. The servant girls, seldom 
the most backward class in matters of dress, have 
not advanced generally to the use of printed cottons, 
shawls, and bonnets. The wardrobe of a male or 
female of the same class in England, and especially 
in Scotland where a Sunday suit of clothes is a ne- 
cessary of life, and the want of it one of the privations 
of poverty very keenly felt, would sell for more, on an 
average, than the clothing of any three individuals in 
the same station of life on the Continent. Yet the 
people above the mass of the labouring population, 
all who belong to the upper class, dress more expen- 
sively, perhaps, than people of the same means and 
station with us. There is a gap between the higher 
and the lower strata of the social body, not in means 
of living and in dress only, but in ideas, habits, lan- 
guage, and ways of living and civilisation ; and the 
gap is not filled up, as in our social body, by innume- 
rable gradations of income, well-being, and intelli- 
gence, forming a middle class united so closely with 
the upper on the one side and the lower on the other, 
that it is impossible to lay the finger on any interval 
between them, and say, here the gold ends and the 
iron begins in the social chain. The established 



FRANKFORT IN 1849. 4 LI 

financial operations of Frankfort on a great scale, 
its ancient hereditary right to have the coronation of 
the emperors of Germany within its walls, and the 
accommodation which its spacious mansions, inns, and 
public buildings could furnish at once to a parliament, 
a government, and all official departments of a state, 
give Frankfort a strong claim to be the future metro- 
polis of the future empire of the 40,000,000 of Ger- 
man race and tongue, who are to be united under one 
central government, when this young Germany de- 
scends from the clouds and takes her seat on the 
earth. But Frankfort is too near the French frontier. 
The capital of a mighty empire of 40,000,000 of 
people would not be suitably placed where, in the 
event of a war with France, any dashing lieutenant 
of Hussars could give the majesty and wisdom of the 
united central power of the new German empire, an 
alerte, on a dark night, and return without obstruc- 
tion. Frankfort, like Hamburgh and other ancient 
free cities, demolished her fortifications after the 
peace of 1815, and converted them into very beautiful 
walks and ornamental gardens for her citizens ; but 
this anticipation of the wishes of the peace congress 
has turned out to be a policy more agreeable than 
wise. These independent cities, in 1849, could neither 
keep out, nor keep in, the hordes of vagabonds and 
free corps volunteers who were masters of their 
streets, and who afforded a pretext to Prussia to 
throw into them garrisons which will probably never 
be withdrawn. 

Frankfort, in the spring of 1849, just before the 
removal of the parliament to Stuttgard, afforded many 
curious scenes. The conflict of political interests ran 
high ; the news of the bloody tumults in Dresden 



412 THE PAULUS KIRCHE. 

were made known by placards from hour to hour ; 
and at every street corner stood a knot of idlers. 
Strangers in peaked hats, beards, cloaks of brown 
woollen with hoods, like the stage costume of Spanish 
muleteers — lads of twenty, half-stupified with tobacco- 
smoke — stalked about like the heroes of a melo-drama, 
pale, emaciated, and with a dissipated sottish look, 
representing, it was said, the red republicans. They 
appeared more fit for living and talking in an over- 
heated coffee-room, amidst the fumes of tobacco and 
Bavarian beer, than for service in the tented field. 
The inns were full of more respectable persons re- 
moving from the smaller towns in Baden ; and many 
who had the means were removing to France or 
Belgium. In the large saloons of the inns — and 
owing to the great concourse of people at the fairs, 
they are on the largest scale— the noise of 150 ex- 
cited politicians, the cloud of smoke from 150 cigars, 
the clatter of plates at the supper table, at which the 
guests were served a la carte, and amidst all this 
hubbub three or four ladies quietly sewing, knitting, 
or eating supper, as comfortably as if they were at 
home at their own firesides, made a curious scene to 
English eyes, ears, and noses. 

St. Paul's church in Frankfort will take its place 
in history, as well as St. Stephen's in Westminister, 
but not exactly as high. The German parliament, 
the first, and probably the last, elected by universal 
suffrage to represent the whole Germanic population, 
and frame a united central government and consti- 
tution, sat in the Paulus Kirche, until June, 1849, 
when its remnant retired to Stuttgard, and expired in 
its own smoke. This church is a modern circular 
building of red freestone, standing in a small square 



THE GERMAN PARLIAMENT. 413 

area, of which the Exchange forms one side. A 
porter mug, bottom up, would give a very good 
idea of its ground-plan, elevation, and proportions. 
It was not selected, certainly, for its architectural 
beauty, to be the seat of the German parliament ; but 
the convenience of its interior makes up for the 
defects of its exterior. The British house of com- 
mons is not so comfortably, and roomily accommo- 
dated. The president's chair occupied the place of the 
pulpit ; the precentor's desk was the tribune ; and 
what may have been the elders' seat, was sufficiently 
capacious for the clerks and a table or two. Right, 
left, right centre, left centre, extreme right, extreme 
left, were divisions in the arrangement of the benches 
made by the necessary passages for the congregation 
to their seats. A circular gallery above admitted the 
public, and could accommodate about a thousand peo- 
ple. Below it, on the same level with the seats of 
the members, the ladies, the diplomatic corps, the 
reporters, and strangers with a member's ticket, or 
with that universal ticket a gulden, were conveniently 
seated. The chair was taken at a quarter past nine 
every morning, and the house seldom rose before two, 
and often had an evening sitting from four to eight 
or nine. What first strikes the traveller is, that all 
the members wore mustaches, beards, tips, or other 
hairy appendages of all dimensions and colours, which 
to the English eye, not accustomed to see gentlemen in 
such fantastic chin accoutrements, gave the assembly 
the appearance of a masquerade, or of a meeting of 
old clothesmen. Two eyes, a nose between, and a 
mass of hair below hiding all expression of the most 
expressive feature in the human countenance, the 
mouth, have the effect of a paper mask over the face, 



414 THE FRANKFORT PARLIAMENT .* APPEARANCE: 

or of an exhibition of wax figures. The most elo- 
quent and impassioned public speaker, with the lower 
half of his face wagging up and down the bunch of 
hair attached to it, as he opens and shuts his mouth, 
appears too like the child's toy of Mr. Punch, with 
a moveable joint in the under jaw opening and shut- 
ting by a string, not to excite the risible propensities 
of the spectator from the shaven lands of Europe. 
These are trifles to remark ; but as an indication of 
character, either in an individual or a people, affecta- 
tion is no trifle. Weakness of character, and affecta- 
tion of appearing to be what one is not, are most 
clearly shown in trifles. The majority of an assembly 
born and bred with beardless chins, affecting in man- 
hood to appear like knights of the middle ages, as 
represented in ancient paintings, by wearing beards, 
mustaches, tips, and fantastic hats or caps, to give 
picturesque effect to their heads, do not convey to 
the observer of character the idea that these are men 
of real sound sense and independent mind, or that 
such fantastically dressed up imitative heads have 
much of their own inside of them. 

This Frankfort parliament, after doing nothing for 
about fifteen months, died of imbecility. It is, how- 
ever, a great dead fact in German history. It received, 
in 1848, the legitimate power from all the German 
states, to replace the diet of the confederation as esta- 
blished at Frankfort in 1816, and to form a constitu- 
tion for all Germany as one united nation, with a 
strong central government. The members were elected 
by universal suffrage, with the consent of the local 
governments ; and all the thirty-eight states of the 
German confederation, established in 1816, gave in 
their adhesion to this assembly. It represents un- 



NUMBER OF MEMBERS FROM EACH STATE. 415 

questionably the highest authority, as the state of the 
Germanic empire, and its power and rights cannot be 
abolished by any local diet or act of one of the states 
of the empire, nor, on legitimate principle, by any act 
of all the thirty-eight states, without a recognition of 
this Frankfort parliament, and a renunciation of its 
powers to an assembly similarly constituted. It de- 
serves, therefore, some notice, although to appearance 
defunct ; because in it is buried whatever vitality 
any assembly at Erfurt, or elsewhere, under Prussian 
auspices, can have as a diet or as a constituent assem- 
bly for all Germany. 

The Frankfort assembly consisted, in February, 
1849, of about 558 members. Of these — 

193 members were from Prussia, 6 members were from Nassau, 

110 from Austria, 6 from Mecklenburg Schwerin, 

68 from Bavaria, 5 from Luxemburg and Lemburg, 

26 from TVurtemberg, 5 from Oldenburgh, 

24 from Hanover, 4 from Brunswig, 

21 from Saxony, 4 from Saxe Weimar, 

19 from Baden, 2 from Saxe Coburg Gotha, 

12 from Hesse (the Duchy), 2 from Saxe Meiningen, 

11 from Hesse (the Electorate), 2 from Altenburg, 

1 1 from Holstein, 3 from the city of Hamburgh, 

and of the remaining eighteen of the hitherto dis- 
tinct independent states in the German confederation, 
established in 1816, one member was allotted to each. 
It does not appear on what principle the preparatory 
assembly at Heidelberg had proceeded, in alloting the 
number of representatives each state was to send to 
this German parliament ; and the stirring events which 
followed fast upon each other, prevented any discus- 
sion, objection, or inquiry on the subject. If popu- 
lation was the principle, Prussia, with her 14,000,000 
of people, had scarcely a fair right to almost double 
the number of representatives accorded to Austria, 



416 PROPORTIONS OP REPRESENTATIVES. 

with a greater population in her German dominions 
than 14,000,000. Holstein, with 300,000 inhabitants, 
or if Schleswig is to be taken into it, with 600,000, 
can scarcely have had a right to near half as many 
representatives as Wlirtemberg, Hanover, Saxony, or 
Baden, each of which reckons from 1^ million to 2^ 
millions of inhabitants. The principle seems to have 
been to give a preponderance to Prussian representa- 
tives, or those of the states on the Rhine, or in the 
centre of Germany, in which education in the schools 
and universities is established on the Prussian model, 
and under teachers and professors of one mind, regu- 
lating and guiding public opinion by the educational 
machinery in their hands in one direction on political 
subjects. The interests of the Prussian autocratic 
government were not the object in this excess of the 
Prussian element, but the influence of the class of 
educated men desirous of a change in the social arrange- 
ments of Prussia, as well as of other German states, 
and who were most numerous in the country in which 
the government and institutions were least suited to 
their requirements. 

It cannot be said, that universal suffrage had col- 
lected together a number of representatives of inferior 
education, manners, or appearance, to the average of 
the gentlemen of the country. This was perhaps the 
first observation that occurred to any English travel- 
ler who entered the Paulus Kir die during the session 
of this Frankfort assembly. There was not one of 
the class of Burschen, or students ; and not one even 
who appeared to belong to the class of peasant-proprie- 
tors, or of artisans, tradesmen, or dealers in the towns. 
As far as the impression given to personal appearance 
by education, intelligence, dress, and manners, can 



THE FRANKFORT PARLIAMENT. 417 

guide the stranger, he would undoubtedly say, " These 
are the gentry of the country." There was no indi- 
vidual answering to the idea of the reckless adventurer, 
red republican, socialist, communist, of our journals 
and their foreign correspondents. Universal suffrage 
had certainly been acted upon with perfect good faith 
by the people, in electing their representatives from 
those situations in life in which the constituents have 
a right to expect integrity and knowledge. The fault 
in the construction of this assembly seemed to be the 
want of representatives of the lower and middle classes, 
the operatives and tradesmen of the towns, and the 
small peasant-proprietors. The composition of this 
assembly, the classes furnishing the representatives for 
all Germany, elected by universal suffrage, appeared 
to me more important than the political divisions 
among the representatives themselves, as indicating 
the relative social importance in the estimation of the 
German people, and in their social structure, of the 
different classes and interests in the social body, and 
of the influence of those classes respectively over the 
public mind and affairs. 

It was one of the smart sayings of Madame de 
Stael, when she was queen of the literary world, and 
Frederick Schlegel was her prime minister for intel- 
lectual affairs — " That the French had the dominion of 
the land, the English of the sea, and the Germans of 
the air;" and the conceit went the round of Europe. 
This nebulous dominion, the intellectuality of Ger- 
many, had its full share of the representation in the 
Frankfort parliament. There were ninety-five pro- 
fessors, rectors of high schools, and teachers, and 
sixty-eight of these were real live professors of uni- 
versities ; also eighty-one doctors of philosophy, law, 

E E 



418 COMPOSITION OF THE PARLIAMENT. 

or physic ; fourteen journalists and authors by pro- 
fession ; and seventeen clergy ; in all, 207 members 
of the house connected professionally with literature 
and science as their means of living. Of country 
gentlemen or landholders, including one or two counts, 
princes, and a few barons, there were ninety-three ; 
of civil functionaries there were 212; of military 
officers, thirteen ; of merchants, only twenty- three ; 
and of manufacturers, only ten. The small propor- 
tion of representatives of the commercial and manu- 
facturing interests, compared to that of the func- 
tionary and of the literary and educational interests, 
is sufficiently characteristic of the spirit of this assem- 
bly, and of the preponderance in all their transactions, 
of theory and extravagant schemes of aggrandise- 
ment, over practical knowledge and reform of existing 
abuses. The short regime of this Frankfort parlia- 
ment was very aptly designated in the " Times," as 
an anarchy of professors. 

The most remarkable feature in this German par- 
liament was the unseen sub-machinery of clubs. It 
is of importance that this club-system should be un- 
derstood ; because, in France, as well as in Germany, 
it is the basis of those pseudo-parliaments called re- 
presentative, or national, assemblies, in which nothing 
is represented but clubs and club opinions : and in 
our own parliament there is, at present, too great a 
tendency towards club-legislation. Every member of 
this Frankfort parliament was a member of one or 
other of six or seven clubs, established at different 
hotels, and distinguished from each other by various 
shades of political opinion. The club Milani (so called 
from the name of the coffee-house in which it held its 
meetings) was the club of the extreme right. It was 



CLUB-MACHINERY IN THE PARLIAMENT. 419 

the first organised ; and its programme, or declara- 
tion of principles and regulations, is dated in Septem- 
ber, 1848. It declares, first, that the end and object 
of the national assembly is to frame a German con- 
stitution. Second, that this can only be accomplished 
by uniting with the governments of the single Ger- 
man states. Third, that with the exception of the 
constitution and the laws necessary for its establish- 
ment, it is not competent for the national assembly to 
issue laws for Germany. Fourth, that the national 
assembly should only exercise a constitutional con- 
trol over the acts of the ministry, and not busy 
itself with interference in executive measures. The 
regulations of this club were adopted by all the 
others, however widely different in politics, and give 
an instructive view of the secret machinery of the 
system. 

1st. Each member binds himself, before bringing 
into the national assembly any motion, amendment, 
or question, to the ministers of his own, to submit 
the same to the consideration of the club, to be de- 
bated upon ; and if not approved of by a majority of 
the club at their ordinary meeting, to give up his 
proposed motion, amendment, or question. Any ex- 
ception to this rule can only be allowed in unforeseen 
cases arising in the course of the proceedings while 
the national assembly is sitting, and then only with 
the consent of the president of the club. 

2nd. The club will be united in voting in the 
national assembly, upon all isolated questions that 
may come before it, as much as possible. When, in a 
special meeting, or a meeting of half the club at least, 
two thirds of the members present declare a question 
to be a party-question, no member in the minority 

E E 2 



420 THE CLUB-SYSTEM EXAMINED. 

shall speak or vote in the national assembly against 
the view adopted by the majority of the club, and its 
absent members shall be informed of the decision of 
the club upon the question. 

3rd. For bringing forward the views and decisions 
of the club in the national assembly, both in open 
and in party questions, the club appoints beforehand 
the speakers from among themselves who are to speak 
in the national assembly on the question. 

The clubs of the Casino, of the Landsberg, of the 
Wiirtemberg Hotel, of the Augsburg Hotel, of the West 
End Hall, of the German Hotel, of the Donnersberg 
Hotel, all differing from each other in shades of poli- 
tical opinion, comprehended all the members of the 
national assembly, from the extreme right, of which 
the programme is given above, to the extreme left, 
the club of the Donnersberg Hotel, of which the pro- 
gramme professes liberty, equality, fraternity. Its 
members adopt the theory of a social republic and 
the rights of labour, but repudiate communism. In 
this club, however, as in all the clubs of the left, from 
the Wiirtemberg Hotel Club to this, a good constitu- 
tional monarchy would, it was said, satisfy a majority 
of the members, although they were so widely distant 
in theory from monarchical government. The elo- 
quence, and talents, and public favour, seemed alto- 
gether on the left side of the house. In all these 
clubs the three statutes, or regulations, of the club 
Milani, with regard to all motions, amendments, or 
questions being previously laid before the club, dis- 
cussed, and approved of, and the speakers on it in the 
assembly appointed by the club, were adopted ver- 
batim and acted upon. The arrangement appears, 
to our common English understandings, inconsistent 



THE CLUB-SYSTEM EXAMINED. 421 

altogether with the duty and dignity of a representa- 
tive, and with a sound constitutional parliament. The 
members, under those restrictions of their clubs, are, 
in fact, not representatives of the people, carrying the 
wants, interests, and views of their constituents to a 
parliament, and are not even representatives of their 
own opinions. They are only delegates of their clubs 
in voting, and organs of their clubs in speaking. 
These pseudo-parliaments, both in France and Ger- 
many, are but large clubs to which seven or eight 
minor clubs send their delegates, to harangue and 
vote, according to views, arguments, and opinions 
previously rehearsed. The character and position of 
the representative are merged in the club member. 
The representation of the people in this German par- 
liament was but a theatrical show, got up and enacted 
the evening before in the different clubs ; and all the 
arguments and speeches, opinions and votes, were 
prepared for the public exhibition at the private 
rehearsals in the clubs. 

These clubs, it may be said, represent the public 
opinion, as by their numerous branches and affilia- 
tions in every town and city, they form a network 
over the whole population, and do, in fact, represent 
the people. It is no incongruity, therefore, it was 
alleged, that the member of the national parliament 
should be regulated by, and subservient to, his club, 
which is the depositary of the public opinion on the 
political questions it espouses. But this at the ut- 
most applies only to the population of the towns and 
cities. The country population, and the great body 
of the middle and lower classes in the towns, can 
have no clubs to express their opinions by, and have 
no civil liberty to form clubs. The clubs are but a 

E E 3 



422 THE ANTI-CORN-LAW LEAGUE CLUB: 

vicious organisation of a minority, to give their views 
and opinions a greater appearance than those of a 
more tranquil majority. Public opinion and club 
opinion may coincide, but they are of very different 
origin and tendency. Club opinion, as we see in 
France, and as we saw in our Anti-Corn-Law League 
agitation, is manufactured in the metropolis by the 
mother-club, sent out by her to all her offspring in 
the country towns, sent by them to all their affilia- 
tions, and then returns to the parent-club with an 
appearance of prodigious force and diffusion, as the 
expression from all quarters of an universal public 
opinion, while after all it is but the opinion of a club 
or party widely diffused in appearance, by skilful 
arrangement and dexterity in the charlatanism of 
agitation. It may be right, and may .coincide with 
the real public opinion, as in the case with us of the 
abolition of the corn laws. But it may also be wrong, 
as in the cases of socialism, communism, red-repub- 
licanism, red-aristocracy, Prussianism, Austrianism, 
Bourbonism, Napoleonism, and other party questions 
among a few individuals or a small party, bandying 
their own opinions backwards and forwards among 
clubs and meetings got up by themselves, and repro- 
ducing it as public opinion. Will Mr. Cobden, or Mr. 
Bright, or any leader of the Anti-Corn-Law League 
say, now that the movement is over and the question 
triumphantly and satisfactorily carried, that the end 
justified the means? that the hiring of itinerating 
orators to go about the country to agitate, the esta- 
blishing of corresponding clubs with weekly meetings 
and paid speakers and pamphlet-writers, the raising of 
a large common fund to keep up and diffuse the agi- 
tation, were safe, sound, and constitutional means ? 



ITS PRINCIPLE DANGEROUS. 423 

The object was undeniably good, and approved of by 
all; but do not the leaders of the movement them- 
selves admit, by dissolving the association and its 
ramifications, that they had introduced a new, dan- 
gerous, and unconstitutional element into the social 
structure of this country ; an organised power to 
control the legislature ; a power as liable to be turned 
to evil as to good, and which may be perverted to 
misdirect public opinion to the worst, as well as the 
best of ends, and to give mere party or club opinion 
the appearance of a generally expressed desire of the 
public? A physical force demonstration for the 
repeal of the corn laws, and a dozen riots or tumults 
at the hustings on a general election, would not have 
been so dangerous to the British constitution, as this 
successful example of an organised club for controlling 
the legislature and for creating the agitation it 
wielded. It was the principle of the French clubs 
and of these German clubs, introduced for the first 
time into the public affairs of England, with a regu- 
larly organised machinery, and with complete success. 
The principle carried out to its full extent, would 
introduce into England a club regime, identical in 
principle with that which governed France in the 
days of Robespierre, and governs France and Ger- 
many now. It does not belong to the social state of 
England. One distinction there is between the 
English Anti-Corn-Law League and the French or 
German clubs, one arising from the good sense of 
the English people as much as from the discretion of 
the leaders of the movement — the agitation was 
strictly confined to one practical interest obvious to 
every man with a mouth to be filled, and it could not 
be diverted from the one plain object — the cheap loaf 

E E 4 



424 DILATOEY PROCEEDINGS OF THE 

— and directed to any other. When the object was 
attained, the machinery used for the agitation was 
flung away by the people with contempt. The paid 
orator, the corn-law lecturer, the club-room president, 
the gratis-pamphlet writer, all the means and hirelings 
employed, fell at once into obscurity and utter con- 
tempt ; and with abuses and grievances enough to be 
reformed and abolished, the public repudiated the 
means and the machinery of the Anti-Corn-Law League 
for coercing the legislature by a pressure from with- 
out. In the German clubs the material interests of 
the people were the least and last subjects of discus- 
sion. Abstract principles of social philosophy, and 
all that ought, or ought not, to enter into a perfect 
constitution, were keenly debated in the clubs and the 
parliament, while the most essential practical reforms 
of abuses before their eyes were never thought of. 

This club-parliament, formed of seven clubs of 
professors and functionaries, and representing their 
own theories and political opinions, not the people of 
Germany or their social wants and requirements, was 
divided into two main branches ; the right or con- 
servative, and the left or liberal. The right was 
divided into an Austrian interest, unwilling to make 
any concession to the demands for reform of the old- 
established usages of the empire ; and the Prussian, 
equally conservative, but ready to make any con- 
cession, however extravagant, such as entering into 
the war against Denmark for the annexation of 
Schleswig to the German empire, the raising of 
troops, fleets, and the exercise of executive power by 
this legislative assembly, provided a popular ascend- 
ancy for Prussia could be gained. Between the two, 
the left, or liberal party, divided into many shades 



CLUB-PARLIAMENT OF FRANKFORT. 425 

of opinion between a limited sovereignty or empire 
and a republic, could only get the most obviously 
necessary measures for obtaining a central government 
passed through the House, by gaining the votes and 
support of one or other of these two interests which 
had but one object in view — to give the empire to 
its own chief, with as few concessions to the people, 
or limitations on the power of the chief of the new 
empire, as possible. To gain time, and allow the 
popular ferment to exhaust itself, were the parlia- 
mentary tactics both of Yon Schmerling and Yon 
Gageren. The indignation and ridicule of all Ger- 
many overtook this club-parliament of philosophers. 
Public suspicion was aroused, and expressed openly 
that treachery to the cause was at work, in the un- 
necessary procrastination and postponement of all real 
business ; that the ministry of Yon Gageren were 
purposely availing themselves of the incapacity and 
inexperience of the long-winded speculative members 
who wasted the time of the House and wore out the 
patience of the people, in order to create an indifference 
and apathy, perhaps a reaction, in the public mind 
favourable to the restoration of the old order of affairs 
in Germany, or of the predominance of Prussia. It 
cannot be denied that, in the history of this par- 
liament, it is impossible to combine the past with the 
present, the postponement of the most urgent measures 
as " not urgent," while time was wasted in the most 
frivolous discussions, and the resignation of this 
ministry on the eve of a struggle between the par- 
liament and the Reichsverweser on a constitutional 
principle, and their giving up even their seats as 
members of the parliament, without coming to the 
conclusion that the leaders of the House, the Yon 



426 CAUSES OF THE OVERTHROW OF 

Gageren ministry, have either been playing a false and 
treacherous part, or have been men of very weak 
character. They can only be acquitted of treachery 
by the admission of extreme imbecility. If they had 
intended to betray the popular cause of constitutional 
government, to play into the hands of those who de- 
sired the re-establishment of the former political 
condition of the German people, to bring the parlia- 
ment into discredit and disarm it of power and 
public support, Yon Gageren and his colleagues in 
the ministry could not have acted more efficiently. 
When twenty-eight of the minor states of Germany 
gave in their adhesion to the central government and 
constitution, and the king of Wiirtemberg, in April, 
1849, was obliged by the diet, or chambers of the 
kingdom and the people, to acknowledge the Reiclis- 
vevweser and the Frankfort parliament as the supreme 
authority in Germany, the practical and obvious 
measure of sending commissioners to those states 
from this supreme central power, to receive the oath 
of allegiance of their civil and military functionaries 
to the German constitution and central government, 
was repeatedly urged on the assembly, both by 
members and by numerous petitions from the people 
and functionaries of those states, This measure was 
always overruled by the influence of Yon Gageren and 
his party in the House, and postponed as " not urgent." 
In May, 1849, when the king of Prussia declined 
definitively the imperial crown from the Frankfort 
constituent assembly, and intimated his non-acknow- 
ledgment of the constitution, on the ground that the 
princes and existing states were not called in and 
consulted on its formation, the central government 
at Frankfort had no tie upon those minor states 



THE CLUB-PARLIAMENT OF FKANKFOKT. 427 

which had already given in their adhesion, but now 
either openly withdrew it and followed Prussia, or 
waited the course of events and would not commit 
themselves to support it, not having given any formal 
affirmation or oath of allegiance to it. The central 
government, led by Yon Gageren as first minister, or 
as president of the parliament, neglected to take pos- 
session of the power and machinery offered to them, 
voted it to be " not urgent," and actually would not, 
when called upon, furnish to their adherents in civil 
or military office in those states, the excuse for not 
acting against them, of having already taken an oath 
of allegiance to the central government at Frankfort 
as the supreme state. The Landwehr troops through- 
out Germany would have refused to act without the 
orders, or against the orders, of the central govern- 
ment at Frankfort, if they had been regularly sworn 
in by commissioners in due time, to bear true alle- 
giance to that power as the superior government. 
This formality, so unimportant in the opinion of the 
philosophers of the national assembly that they readily 
acquiesced with Yon Gageren and his party in laying 
it aside as " not urgent," w T ould have saved Germany 
from her present distracted state, would have fur- 
nished the local functionary and the common man 
with a valid reason for refusing to act in the Land- 
wehr or other local service, against or without the 
orders of the Reichsverweser and the central govern- 
ment at Frankfort, to which he had sworn allegiance 
with the consent of the local state. The common 
man in Germany would be a religious man if his 
betters would allow him. Wanting the valid excuse 
of a previous oath of allegiance to a supreme state, 
he could not refuse to obey, and inarch against that 



428 NEGLECT OF THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT 

state and his brother Germans, without a breach of 
military duty to the local authorities of the state he 
belonged to before the establishment of a supreme 
central state. The neglect, rejection, or indefinite 
postponement of a measure so urgent, by Yon Gageren, 
Yon Schmerling, Bassermann, and the other ministers 
or leaders of iufluence in the parliament, seems to 
justify the suspicion that these men had been working 
for a party interest only, for an Austrian or Prussian 
supremacy in Germany, not for a united, independ- 
ent, central German government and nationality. The 
chain of events leads to no other conclusion than 
treachery or imbecility on the part of the leaders of 
this German parliament, from March 1848 to June 
1849. 

This is an instance of the importance of the reli- 
gious element in social and political affairs, even in 
countries in which religion, either in its Catholic or 
Protestant form, appears to have little influence. The 
promise, the mere form of promise, of allegiance 
given in a religious shape, cannot be made so binding 
on the human mind in any other form, or with any 
other reference than to religion, even when the in- 
dividuals sworn are not religious. The affirmation, 
the assurance, has reference to the moral element 
only. The oath adding to it the obligation of the 
religious element, cannot be dispensed with. Society 
could not exist without the social power of the reli- 
gious as well as the moral obligation. It has been the 
great mistake, during this half century, in the social 
policy of Germany, of Prussia, and, in imitation of 
Prussia, of all the minor Protestant states, to attempt 
to bring to a uniformity of doctrine and worship 
the two branches of the Protestant Church. The ill- 



THE CAUSE OF THE FALL OF THE PARLIAMENT. 429 

judged and unnecessary attempt produced an apathy 
and indifference, perhaps even an hostility, to all re- 
ligious doctrine or practice, thus forced upon men by 
their governments. This German parliament was over- 
turned, as a social power, by the neglect or contempt 
of the religious element ; yet to that element it owed 
its own existence. 

The revolution in Paris of the 24th February, 1848, 
gave, no doubt, the immediate impulse to the general 
movement in Germany of the following March ; but 
the spark which then broke out into a name, had been 
kindled by the collisions between the German govern- 
ments and the people, by the forced union of the Lu- 
theran and Calvinistic Churches among the Protes- 
tant population, and, more recently, by the forcible 
suppression of the schism from the Church of Rome of 
Eonge and Czerski, or the German Catholic Church, 
among the Catholic population. It is a very short- 
sighted view of this great social movement of 1848, 
among the 40,000,000 of people, to attribute it to secret 
associations of students, or revolutionary enthusiasts, 
republicans, and propagandists of extravagant theo- 
ries. What funds, what influence, what following, 
could such a class, with all their clubs and newspaper 
paragraphs, have in the vast, peacefully inclined, and 
patient German population, if the material, the enor- 
mous mass of real grievance, had not existed as a 
combustible prepared by the misgovernment of their 
rulers, and ready to catch fire from the most insig- 
nificant sparks ? The Germans are a speculative 
people, who vindicate their intellectual freedom, and 
resent every attempt, open or concealed, on the right 
to think freely, as zealously as we would an attack 
upon our freedom to act in our material interests. 



430 CONNEXION OF THE GERMAN MOVEMENT IN 1848 

The reason is, that their middle class is composed 
almost entirely of men who have no other path to 
distinction, social weight, and individual well-being, 
than through mind — through the free action of in- 
tellectual power. Our middle class attain the same 
objects, through the humbler paths of industry in com- 
mercial or manufacturing enterprise. The forced amal- 
gamation of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches by 
the late king of Prussia into one new Church, with a 
new liturgy and new forms of his own devising, to be 
called the Evangelical Church, and the persecution of 
the Lutherans and Calvinists — the imprisonment, 
deprivation of office, banishment, quartering of dra- 
goons, and ruin of the people who refused to accept of 
this new Church and liturgy — was the first step in the 
revolution which is now in progress in Germany. It 
was the first and most revolting aggression on the 
freedom of religion, since the Keformation ; and one 
touching that intellectual freedom which the German 
people have always prized, and, even under the most 
despotic governments, have always vindicated as their 
own — as their inviolable rights of mind. It was not 
in Prussia alone that this interference of the govern- 
ment with the freedom of religious conviction and 
the right of private judgment in religious opinion, 
was carried on, in the spirit of the darkest ages. In 
Baden, Hesse, and almost the whole Protestant Ger- 
many, excepting Hanover, the amalgamation of the 
Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches was, in imita- 
tion or at the suggestion of Prussia, made a state 
affair. The Calvinistic Church was considered, and 
in Baden openly declared by the government to be, 
in its simplicity of worship and in the principle of 
its Church government, too democratic to be tolerated 



WITH THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTIONS IN PRUSSIA. 431 

in monarchical governments. The two branches of 
the Protestant Church were living in perfect amity 
with each other. Time, good sense, perhaps indiffer- 
ence had allayed every feeling of discordance about 
ceremonial or even doctrinal points, between Lu- 
therans and Calvinists, when the Prussian govern- 
ment stepped in, and kindled the extinguished embers 
of religious feeling into a flame, not between the two 
Churches, but between the two Churches and the state. 
The external forms of worship, the ancient service 
and liturgy of the Lutheran Church, were abolished 
by a royal edict ; and a new liturgy, Church service, 
and forms in part composed by the autocrat himself, 
with altars, candlesticks with lighted candles, cruci- 
fixes, pictures, robes, and such appendages of Church 
scenery as were considered Popish in the Lutheran 
Church itself, and were utterly repugnant to Calvin- 
istic principles and feelings, were imposed equally 
upon both Churches ; together with a common Church 
government under bishops appointed by the state, 
and with a common name, the Evangelical Church. 
In our country such a measure would unseat Queen 
Victoria from her throne, and bring her ministers to 
the block. Yet the folly of the late king of Prussia 
attempted this measure in a kingdom not then six 
years old, composed of shreds torn from other coun- 
tries less despotically ruled under their former govern- 
ments than under the Prussian sway, and not con- 
solidated into one nation. This insanity of autocratic 
will — the future historian will give it no other name 
— was carried so far, that by an order to the college 
of censorship at Berlin in 1821, the censors were 
commanded no longer to permit the words Protestant 
or Protestants to be used in publications or writings, 



433 THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTIONS IN PRUSSIA. 

but instead thereof to cause the word Evangelical to 
be used. Yet, but three years before, this very king 
had himself laid the foundation-stone of a monument, 
in the market-place of Wittenburg, to Martin Luther, 
the founder of the Protestant Church, and of which 
the inauguration took place in the very year in which 
the names even of Protestant and Protestantism were 
proscribed and forbidden by order of the capricious 
monarch. The persecution of the old Lutherans, 
who, in spite of the royal will and edicts, adhered to 
the liturgy, service, and doctrines of the Lutheran 
Church — the imprisonment of the clergymen who re- 
fused to adopt the new liturgy, forms, and doctrines, 
instead of the old — the military free quarters of dra- 
goons on the peasants' families in the villages in Sile- 
sia, who adhered to their clergy and to the forms of 
worship and liturgy handed down to them from their 
forefathers, a kind of persecution unheard of in 
Europe since the days of Louis XIV. — the expulsion 
of some thousands of these villagers from their homes, 
and their emigration to America to enjoy the liberty 
of Christian worship in the forms and doctrines of the 
Church in which they had been baptized and bred up 
— are historical facts of this 19th century in Prussia, 
very similar in origin, progress, and character to 
those which distinguished the first half of the 17th 
century in England. The coincidence of character 
and spirit of acting, as well as of the movement and 
its connection with religious freedom, is very remark- 
able. The late king of Prussia appears to have been 
the counterpart of our King James — pedantic, incon- 
sistent, despotic yet weak, and intent on imposing his 
own royal wisdom and will on his subjects in matters 
which do not belong to law and government. With 



THE LATE KING OF PRUSSIA. 433 

the same inflated ideas of the Divine rights and 
supremacy of kings, and their inherent wisdom as 
well as power, he attempted to legislate in all things, 
from the highest and most abstruse doctrines of the 
Eucharist in the Protestant Churches, to the obscure 
novels of the circulating library. Like James I. he 
was minute in his wrath and lawgiving ; and forgot 
to a ridiculous extent, that the fly he intended to 
crush was beyond the reach of his edicts. In 1835, 
not only were the works published by some obscure 
writers, Gutzow, Laube, Wienburg, proscribed by the 
royal edict, and their circulation in the kingdom pro- 
hibited, but all that they should hereafter compose 
were prohibited. The writings of H. Heine, not only 
those which had appeared, but which should in future 
appear, came under the same royal anathema ; and 
the booksellers in Berlin were warned by a special 
royal rescript, that they would incur the severest 
punishment if they contravened the royal order. A 
more effectual way of advertising and promoting the 
circulation of works which few had ever heard of and 
nobody cared for, could scarcely have been devised. 
The pedantic autocrat appears to have had a personal 
feud with a respectable Hamburgh bookseller, Brock- 
horst, who, in the course of his trade, had published 
some of the works which displeased his majesty. By 
a royal edict the entrance into the Prussian domi- 
nions of any books whatsoever published by Brock- 
horst, was prohibited. The paper potentate gained 
the campaign. He laughed behind his counter at the 
impotent and ridiculous edict which had to be with- 
drawn amidst the laughter of the idle, and the indig- 
nation of the serious, at such a perversion and degra- 
dation of kingly power. With singular inconsistency, 

F F 



434 SIMILARITY OF CHARACTER OF JAMES II. 

the work of Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, was allowed 
a free circulation, although its object is to overturn 
the Christian religion ; while the petty writings and 
unreadable novels of obscure authors, which the royal 
critic considered adverse to his dignity and govern- 
ment, were strictly prohibited. The poor character 
of this king will furnish an instructive page in the 
history of this German revolution. A future Macau- 
lay will trace from it, as from the triste character of 
James in English history, the first seeds of great 
commotions, resistance to autocratic power and mis- 
government, and of great changes and improvements 
in the social state of Germany. Like James too, 
this sovereign was surrounded by flatterers, men of 
literary note, who endeavoured to embellish his 
character, and to represent him as the father of his 
people, the patron of the arts and sciences, the model 
of public and private worth in every social relation. 
The future historian will reject the venal adulation 
even of men of the highest name for attainments in 
science and literature at the court of Berlin, and will 
judge of this king by the historical facts of his reign : 
that he was restored to his power in 1813, by the 
exertion and blood of his people, under a solemn 
promise to govern by a representative constitution ; 
that he forfeited his royal word and promise ; that 
he established a military yoke by his continuance of 
the Landwehr system, incompatible with personal 
freedom, civil rights, and social progress ; that he 
abolished the Protestant religion in its two branches, 
the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, and endea- 
voured to establish a third Church ; that he was the 
last of European sovereigns who engaged in a reli- 
gious persecution of his subjects, and drove thousands 



AND OF THE LATE KING OF PRUSSIA. 435 

of them into exile, for refusing to abandon the Lu- 
theran Church ; that by intermeddling and governing 
in all things Frederick William III. left to his suc- 
cessor a people very much in the social state, temper, 
and mind of the people left by James I. to Charles I. 
in the 17th century. The beauty and virtues of the 
lovely queen, her prudence, dignity, and sufferings 
during the occupation of the country by the French, 
raised an affectionate and holy feeling among the peo- 
ple of Germany for all belonging to her, which was 
reflected upon her royal consort. Her death was, no 
doubt, hastened by the troubles, trials, and vicissi- 
tudes she had undergone ; and her memory was hal- 
lowed in the sufferings and final triumph of Germany. 
When the widowed monarch, whose deep-rooted 
sorrow and silent never-smiling aspect of woe had 
been the theme of literary flatterers who made him 
a sentimental hero among kings, took to his arms a 
mistress, to console him for the loss of such a queen, 
the right and indignant feeling of his subjects could 
not be repressed. The left-handed marriage with this 
mistress, her elevation to the rank of nobility by the 
title of countess of Lignitz, the respect paid to her 
by the royal family and the court, were considered a 
desecration and insult to the memory of the late 
queen, by the right feeling of the public, and an out- 
rage on that decency and moral feeling by which 
kings and subjects must equally regulate their con- 
duct. A second marriage the people could under- 
stand as natural, and perhaps proper ; but a mock- 
marriage, a marriage of which the progeny are to be 
bastards, solemnised with the religious rites and ser- 
vices of a real marriage by a regular clergyman of 
the new Evangelical Church, was felt by all to be 

F F 2 



436 THE LATE KING OF PEUSSIA. 

an abuse of the moral and religious ties which hold 
society together. The left-handed marriages, and the 
divorces of real marriages, so frequent among the 
German potentates, are not suited to the manners, 
morals, and spirit of the 19th century. The age is 
past when the public feelings of decency, morality, 
and religion, can be outraged with impunity by 
crowned heads. The re-action from the people, when 
they too throw off or slacken the ties of morality, de- 
cency, and religion, shakes the throne. It is now, in 
the generation of young men raving and fighting in 
Germany from the mere love of warfare and tumult, 
without any restraint from social, moral, or religious 
principle, that the policy and conduct of the late 
king of Prussia begin to show their effects. A half 
military education of all the youth, a submission of 
all self-action and social duty to functionary manage- 
ment, a subversion of all hereditary religion among 
the Protestant population, and of all domestic, reli- 
gious, and moral training by the system of govern- 
ment schools independent of the parents, have reared 
up a young generation among the German people, 
bound by none of the ties which hold society together ; 
a growing population without industry, co-operation 
in peaceful pursuits, or mutual interests, ready to cut 
each other's throats and fit for nothing else. 



RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. 437 



CHAP. XVII. 

NOTES ON THE POLICY AND CONDUCT OF PRUSSIA IN THE 
GERMAN MOVEMENT OF 1848, IN THE SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN 

AFFAHtS. RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE TO PRUSSIA AND TO GERMANY 

IN THE RESULTS OF THE SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN WAR. — REAL 
IMPORTANCE OF SCHLESWIG IN THE EUROPEAN SYSTEM. — ON 
THE GERMAN CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY COMPARED TO THE NOR- 
WEGIAN OF 1813. SUPERIORITY OF THE NON-EDUCATED OVER 

THE EDUCATED BODY OF REPRESENTATIVES. ON HAMBURGH 

LIFE IN HAMBURGH — TABLE D'HOTE RAINVILLE's — ALTONA. 

SOCIAL ENJOYMENT OF THE MIDDLE AND LOWER CLASSES IN 

GERMANY ITS EFFECTS — ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES. 

SANITARY CONDITION — MORAL CONDITION HAMBURGH AND 

LUBECK IMPORTANT MILITARY POSTS FOR THE NEW GERMAN 
EMPIRE. 

Never did retributive justice in political affairs so 
speedily overtake moral delinquency, as in the in- 
vasion of Holstein and Schleswig in 1848, by the 
Prussian monarch, for the purpose of annexing those 
provinces to the new German empire, or rather, under 
that pretext, to the Prussian dominions. Holstein 
was unquestionably a duchy of the empire. Whether 
the king of Denmark, as duke of Holstein, had by any 
act incurred the forfeiture of the duchy, and whether 
the provisional government of the empire was entitled 
to do what the emperor could not have done, viz. to 
declare the duchy an escheat to the empire and to 
take military possession of it, are questions of German 
law. It is not at all clear, that the duchy of Schleswig 
ever was a member of the German empire. But 
allowing it was so, allowing with regard to both 

F F 3 



438 RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE ON 

duchies that all the claims are just which the Chevalier 
Bunsen alleges and Mr. Twiss disproves, in their 
respective pamphlets on the Hols tein-Schles wig ques- 
tion, still the civilised world was entitled to expect, 
in the 19th century, that Germany, the most en- 
lightened of European countries, and Prussia, the 
most educated and refined portion of Germany, should 
have resorted to other means to make good territorial 
claims, than a hasty and bloody exertion of brute 
military force, which would have disgraced the darkest 
period of the middle ages, and in barbarity and want 
of principle, is only to be compared to the razzias of 
the French in Algeria, without the same excuse of a 
military necessity. The question was one of simple 
legal right between two civilised states, a weak and a 
strong power, in the European system ; and a question 
which it belonged to lawyers, antiquaries, and the 
decision of some neutral state as arbiter, upon their 
protocols of the facts and arguments, to determine 
according to justice ; nor was the weaker power in- 
clined or able to refuse a reference of the question to 
arbitration, and a prompt submission to the judgment 
however adverse. The revival in Germany of a taste 
for the spirit and deeds of the middle ages, promises 
little for the social good and progressive civilisation 
of Europe, if this return in political affairs to the force 
of the sword, this establishing of right by might, in a 
case not beyond the competency of arbiters to decide 
peacefully according to precedents and equity, be its 
first fruits. Why then was this unnecessary and un- 
principled war begun ? Prussia appears not to have 
had even a legitimate authority to begin it. The 
government of the German empire, at whose call 
Prussia sent her troops to Holstein and Schleswig, 



THE SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN WAR. 439 

was a provisional government only, had not elected 
and proclaimed a chief of the empire, or denned the 
duties and powers of the states or members to be 
amalgamated into a new constitutional empire, or 
appointed a tribunal before which infractions of those 
powers or duties could be tried, and was itself only a 
constituent assembly, governing merely until a go- 
vernment could be framed on constitutional principles. 
In 1849, Prussia repudiated this provisional govern- 
ment herself, yet continued her war against Denmark. 
It was not a permanent established government of 
the German empire — one at whose behest a con- 
scientious monarch would have considered himself 
bound to plunge into war — and not a war of defence 
which could not be avoided or postponed ; but a war 
of aggression, and in which no right or advantage 
was periled by delay. Why was this war begun ? 
The secret spring of it will be found by the future 
historian in these circumstances : — 

At the commencement of the liberal movement in 
Germany, in February, 1848, when a political epi- 
demic and universal thirst for constitutional govern- 
ment broke out in every city in Europe, the policy of 
the royal family of Prussia was decidedly adverse to 
the concession of any constitutional government to its 
own subjects, The solemn promises given in 1813, 
by the late king to the Prussian people, to govern by 
a representative legislature, were violated by the 
sovereign who gave them as an inducement to his 
subjects to rise and expel the French. They did rise 
— they did expel the French — they did reinstate the 
sovereign in his independent throne and dignity — 
and the sovereign deliberately violated his promise. 
Provincial diets without authority to propose or 

F F 4 



440 POLICY AND CONDUCT OF PEUSSIA 

initiate, or even deliberate upon, any measure or 
enactment of the government, but simply to consider 
and petition on any subject laid before them con- 
nected with the local interests of their provinces, 
were the only concessions to the spirit of the age, 
and to the monarch's own sense of honour in the 
fulfilment of solemn promises given in 1813 to the 
people, which the policy of the royal family of Prussia 
would make. Their policy was strictly conservative 
and autocratic. The mention of the promises given 
in 1813, was criminal. The press was fettered; re- 
ligion tampered with, in attempts to amalgamate the 
Lutheran and Calvinist Churches, and persecution 
resorted to for enforcing conformity with the royal 
liturgy. The civil liberty of the subject in his 
domestic life, was encroached upon by educational 
and military duties ; and as in an army every third 
or fourth man is a corporal, or officer of some kind, 
in charge of and superintending the other two or 
three, so, in civil society in Prussia, every fourth or 
fifth man was a government functionary, living upon 
the taxes, and interfering with or superintending the 
free action of individuals. Up to the eleventh hour 
this conservative autocratic policy of the royal family 
of Prussia was adhered to. They were only awakened 
to more liberal and just views by their ineffectual 
resort to military force in the slaughter of the citizens 
of Berlin, and the hesitation of the Landwehr to be 
the instruments of the autocratic sovereign for the 
massacre of the people. The almost simultaneous 
movements in the other cities of Germany for a 
German nationality, and united German empire under 
a constitutional government, had become too general 
and formidable to be withstood. The Prussian people 



IN THE SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN WAH. 441 

tired of expecting the fulfilment of the promises of 
1813, and disgusted with the want of good faith in 
palming upon them the provincial diets as a fulfil- 
ment of those promises, were at the head of this 
German movement. It was not for a Prussian con- 
stitutional government, but for one embracing all 
Germany, and in which the Prussian sovereign would 
be merged as merely one of the members, that the 
movement in Prussia itself was carried on. Prussia, 
as the most powerful, enlightened, and industrious 
German country, and comprehending almost all the 
commercial, manufacturing, and maritime interests 
and industry of Germany, might justly expect to be 
virtually the head of the new German nation, and 
the influences and views of her experienced and able 
men in military, political, and economical science, to 
be predominant. But the royal family of Prussia 
would be nothing in the system. With its autocratic 
policy it could not expect to be the chief, the Reichs- 
verweser, stadholder, and in time emperor, of a new 
German empire ; yet the imperial crown was a fair 
object of ambition for the house of Hohenzolleren. 
The sovereigns of Bavaria and Austria had attained 
the imperial dignity. The third great royal house 
in Germany, the second in actual power, was entitled 
to aspire to it : but this house could not expect the 
support of the Catholic interest in Germany; had 
alienated or rendered indifferent the Protestant in- 
terest by its tampering with the Lutheran and Cal- 
vinistic Churches in their forms of service ; and by its 
autocratic rule and intolerance of liberal principle at 
home had lost the confidence of the constitutional 
party of the German nation, who alone, at that crisis, 
could confer the dignity. No time was to be lost. 



442 POLICY AND CONDUCT OF PRUSSIA, 

An imperial dignity was at stake. It was necessary 
to wheel about and adopt a policy diametrically oppo- 
site to the old, and to show as great zeal in promoting 
the constitutional principle for all Germany, as it had 
displayed, but a few days before, in bloody efforts to 
suppress it in Prussia. By some prompt and brilliant 
act in favour of the cause of constitutional govern- 
ment in Germany, the Prussian family expected that 
the recollection of thirty-three years of absolute, 
autocratic, anti-liberal rule would be effaced, and the 
king, or one of the royal family, would be called by 
acclamation, to be the chief of the popular movement 
and the executive head of the new empire. The 
policy of the house of Hohenzolleren became, at once, 
as ferociously constitutional as it had been tyrannically 
autocratic. The field-pieces and muskets which had 
swept with their fire the streets of Berlin in the royal 
attempt to suppress the constitutional principle among 
the citizens, were scarcely cooled and reloaded before 
they were despatched to Holstein and Schleswig, to 
extend the dominion and power of that very principle. 
The Germans are a people eminently given to loyalty, 
but they have very tenacious memories. The mistake, 
as the court of Berlin called it, of the five hours' un- 
checked firing of the military in the streets of Berlin 
upon the citizens, was too recent to be forgotten. 
The arbitrary amalgamation of the two branches of 
the Protestant Church into a barren hybrid Church, 
and still more the persecution of those who refused to 
acknowledge the new forms of worship imposed on 
them, were not to be forgotten. The unworthy 
treatment at Berlin of two members of the parliament 
of Baden, on account of liberal speeches delivered in 
their own parliament, was not a fact to be forgotten 



AND RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE ON IT. 443 

by liberal members of a German parliament. The 
persecution of the press, and the arbitrary proceedings 
during the last thirty years against all individuals 
who presumed to think, write, or speak on public 
affairs in a liberal strain, were not forgotten. The 
constituent assembly at Frankfort were quite ready 
to accept the assistance of the Prussian monarch, in 
his new-born zeal for constitutional government, and 
to employ it in Holstein and Schleswig ; but were too 
wise to intrust their new constitutional empire in the 
hands of a sovereign, or a royal family, accustomed to 
autocratic rule, who had resisted the most reasonable 
claims, although founded on the royal promise, to a 
representative constitutional government in Prussia 
itself, and whose newly adopted liberal policy, even if 
it were sincere and disinterested, could not be con- 
sidered as consistent, steady, and to be depended 
upon. The assembly at Frankfort elected a prince of 
the house of Austria to the undefined dignity of 
Reichsverweser, and extinguished for a time the im- 
perial aspirations of the house of Hohenzolleren. This 
was the first stroke of retributive justice. The second 
was not less remarkable. By acting according to the 
plainest dictates of humanity and prudence, the pro- 
visional government of Germany might have secured 
the affections and co-operation of the people of 
Schleswig and Holstein ; and the two northern 
powers, Denmark and Sweden, would by ordinary 
prudence have been gradually brought into a per- 
petual alliance with the new German nation. Their 
fleets and armies might have been made available, 
either for attack or defence, in the event of a rupture 
with Russia, England, or France. This flank of the 
German empire might have been made secure with- 



444 POLICY AND CONDUCT OF THE FRANKFORT 

out effort or expense. By following the insane pro- 
jects of a few professors and students at Kiel, men 
either strangers or with no stake in the country, the 
provisional government plunged itself into an unjust 
and ruinous war. The inhabitants of the duchies 
have been alienated by the destruction of their pro- 
perty, unavoidable in the seat of military operations. 
The inhabitants of the coasts of the Baltic and far 
back into the interior have been reduced to misery, 
the blockade of the ports in 1848-1849, preventing the 
export of their timber, flax, grain, and interrupting 
all trade. The two northern powers have been 
thrown into the arms of Russia as their ally and 
protector. The communications between the Baltic 
ports of Germany, and those on the North Sea, are 
by nature cut off by the peninsula of Holstein, 
Schleswig, Jutland, and by the Danish isles, in the 
same way, on a small scale, as the peninsula of Spain 
cuts off the naval power of France in the Mediter- 
ranean, and at Toulon, from its naval power on the 
coasts of the ocean, and at Brest. The commercial 
marine of the one coast cannot be made available by 
the state, for any national marine on the other. To 
establish a German national marine, to have ships — 
ships of war — colonies, and commerce adequate in 
some degree to the importance of the German people 
among the nations of Europe, is the object, or dream, 
of German ambition in the new nationality. It is a 
dream now ; because nothing short of a conquest of 
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, can realise it. To 
a certain extent, however, the object might have been 
attained, and the dream realised, as far as the natural 
obstacles of the relative position of the Baltic and the 
ocean would permit, if the new German government 



AND RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. 445 

had commenced its career in a friendly, just, and con- 
ciliatory spirit towards those Northern powers. They 
with their fleets, seamen, and troops, might have been 
reckoned upon as foreposts of defence on this side of 
Germany ; allies, like those of the Roman empire, de- 
fending their own interests and existence in defending 
her frontier from the barbarian, and more able to 
make a prompt and vigorous defence than the distant 
mother country. With a reckless abandonment of 
principles, treaties, guarantees, and all the acknow- 
ledged ties which hold together the European family 
of nations in civilised and generally peaceful relations 
with each other, the new Germany made no secret 
that, in right of identity of race and language, she 
claimed, not only Holstein, but Schleswig and Jutland, 
and the whole Danish kingdom. The mouths of the 
Rhine too, that is, Holland, and the mouths of the 
Scheld, that is, Belgium, were asserted to be original 
portions of the old Germanic empire, which ought to 
be annexed to the new Germany. The same con- 
venient principle might have been extended to the 
Isle of Thanet and the Thames. The number of 
seamen and ships of war which the new Germany 
could maintain with all the coast of Europe, from 
Ostend round to Copenhagen, and from Copenhagen 
to Danzig, annexed to the new German empire, was 
set forth in numerous pamphlets and speeches, as a 
power to be acquired, and to which the right was not 
wanting. These, it may be said, were but the wild 
speculations and dreams of crazy professors, authors, 
and enthusiastic students. True: but crazy professors, 
authors, and students governed Germany in this move- 
ment ; and men of sober judgment and unquestionable 
principle, such as the Chevalier Bunsen, submitted to be 



446 POLICY AND CONDUCT OF THE FRANKFORT 

tools of such dreamers, and to vindicate their dreams. 
The invasion of Schleswig became a serious and 
bloody reality. By this unnecessary and unprin- 
cipled war Germany has made implacable enemies 
where, by the simple policy of justice and humanity, 
she might have made the firmest allies and friends. 
The want of moral principle and political prudence 
in this unjustifiable war, will be signally punished 
even by its success. The more successful the war and 
the more the populations are by force annexed to Ger- 
many, the more the Northern powers will be alienated. 
Retributive justice has fallen upon the movers of this 
inglorious and unnecessary war, as well as upon the 
agents in it. Public opinion is, in our times, a power 
before which even sovereigns quail. The heartless 
pointless jest of the Prussian monarch, that his war 
in Holstein and Schleswig has been a war of dog 
against fish, will not dry the tear or bring a smile on 
the cheek of the widows and orphans of the victims 
worried in this unprincipled campaign ; but it will be 
recorded in history as an acknowledgment that the 
dog was foiled by the fish, and that the war was as 
unprofitable and disgraceful to the instigators, agents, 
and instruments, as it, and every unprovoked and un- 
necessary war, deserves to be. 

The real insignificance of this Holstein- Schleswig 
territory, for the acquisition of which the peace and 
intercourse of half of Europe have been disturbed, 
and for the conquest of which five kings — the Prussian, 
Bavarian, Saxon, Wlirtemberg, and Hanoverian — and 
all the minor German states sent their forces, to the 
amount of 80,000 men, into the field ; and who, con- 
sidering that the Danes have but an armv of from 
16,000 to 18,000 men to oppose to them, have covered 



PARLIAMENT, AND RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. 447 

themselves with more disgrace than glory, will be 
best appreciated from statistical details. 

Holstein contains 362,217 inhabitants, and Schles- 
wig 300,347. Holstein and Schleswig together con- 
tain 3057 proprietors and tacksmen (Pachters) of 
considerable estates ; 125,150 small peasant-proprie- 
tors or owners of farms (Hofbesitzer) ; 67,710 small 
tenants (Land-Inster) ; 17,481 house cotters; and 
36,283 day labourers in husbandly. Holstein is 
blessed with 1073 civil functionaries, and Schleswig 
rejoices in 684 of the same class. Holstein has 2217 
seamen, boatmen, and fishermen, and Schleswig 4416. 
In Schleswig the youngest son inherits the peasant- 
proprietor's estate or Hof — presumptive proof that 
the district has always been under its own laws, not 
under the civil law, or law prevailing in Germany. 
In Holstein the eldest son inherits as in other parts 
of the German empire. 

For this territory of Schleswig, inferior in popula- 
tion, value, and importance to any of our counties on 
the coast opposite to it, the insane ambition of the 
constituent assembly at Frankfort, and of the Prus- 
sian monarch to be elected emperor of Germany by 
administering to it, has ruined the commerce of 
Hamburgh, Bremen, and of all the Prussian ports in 
the Baltic ; has impoverished the back country far 
and wide, by the stoppage of all the usual export 
trade of their corn and timber during two sum* 
mers ; has incurred expenses which some of the 
German states and kingdoms have not financial 
means to pay without having recourse to forced 
loans and new taxes ; and, above all, has demoralised 
the public mind by exciting and gratifying the blind 
craving for war which the military training of all 



448 IMPORTANCE OF SCHLESWIG 

the youth of the country engenders, and has extin- 
guished the sense of right and wrong in public affairs 
in the breasts of the rulers as well as of the people. 
What can have been the true and secret cause of the 
great exertion of Prussia, under the pretext of obe- 
dience to a central government at Frankfort which 
Prussia repudiates as a legitimate authority, to occu- 
py and retain such an insignificant territory as this 
duchy of Schleswig? 

Schleswig, united with Holstein, would give Prus- 
sia ports on the North Sea as well as on the Baltic — 
would give her a seat among the naval powers of 
Europe. Schleswig also is the key to the Danish 
Islands. It is so situated with respect to Alsen, Fyen, 
and Zealand, that the Danish kingdom could no more 
exist as an independent power with the duchy of 
Schleswig separated from the Danish crown, than 
England, if Kent or Essex, or the Isle of Wight or 
the Isle of Thanet, were in the hands of France or 
Germany. The British ministry, or a German in- 
fluence behind the throne, has allowed too long the 
open violation of her own guarantee of 1730, by which 
Schleswig is inseparably annexed to the kingdom of 
Denmark, and winks now at the occupation of the 
independent state and city of Hamburgh by the troops 
of Prussia on the frivolous pretext of some insult 
having been offered by the rabble to her soldiers 
marching through the streets. The honour and com- 
mercial interests of Great Britain require that the 
free city and state of Hamburgh should be replaced 
in her independence and self-government, and not be 
held, as she now is, by a Prussian garrison; that 
Schleswig should be restored to its legitimate sove- 
reign ; that the Danish monarchy should be upheld 
in its guaranteed integrity ; and that the secret in- 



ON THE EUROPEAN SYSTEM. 449 

fluence by which the honour and interests of this 
country and the safety of her allies have been com- 
promised to promote the visionary schemes of Ger- 
many, or the ambition of Prussia and the interests of 
some petty princes under her influence, should be un- 
derstood, exposed, and repudiated. 

France and Germany in their attempts, in 1848, 
to give themselves liberal constitutions, exhibit a re- 
markable and instructive contrast to the only Euro- 
pean country which has, in modern times, framed for 
itself a free, or indeed, a democratical constitution 
essentially the same as that which they have been 
aiming at — to Norway. The contrast shows that 
the political and social education of a people, and 
their fitness for constitutional government, are not in 
proportion to their school-education, to their attain- 
ments in reading, writing, literature, science, or phi- 
losophy ; but in proportion to their habits of unre- 
strained self-action, their habits of business and of 
managing their own affairs. Germany and France 
are far in advance of Norway in schools, universities, 
and all educational means and attainments ; and their 
constituent assemblies comprehended many of the 
most distinguished philosophers and literary men of 
the age. Yet, what a poor figure they make as legis- 
lators or representatives appointed to form a consti- 
tution, compared to the unschooled boors or pea- 
sant-proprietors and merchants of Norway in their 
constituent assembly! The Norwegian peasant-pro- 
prietor is not, like the German or French, living in a 
climate and on a soil which can produce all he wants 
or consumes. He is of necessity a merchant as well 
as a proprietor, connected with, and exercised in 
business by the sale of his timber, cattle, dairy pro- 

G (i 



450 CONTRAST OF THE GERMAN AND FRENCH 

ducts, and the purchase of his bread-corn and other 
necessaries. His piece of land rarely produces grain 
enough for his daily bread, and in a great part of the 
country produces none at all, and the owner depends 
on the sale of his butter, cheese, cattle, timber, and 
other products for subsistence. The habits of fore- 
thought, reflection, and independent self-action re- 
quired in this social state, form the practical educa- 
tion of this class ; and the higher class are only 
wealthier peasant-proprietors, educated in the same 
school of real business, in which judgment and good 
sense are exercised. When these practical men came to- 
gether in 1813, in a constituent assembly, they went 
to work like men of business. The assembly met on 
the 10th of April, 1813, and consisted of 112 mem- 
bers, of whom twenty-one were peasant-proprietors, 
five were larger landowners, eleven were merchants, 
fourteen were clergymen, seventeen were officers or 
civil functionaries, thirteen were non-commissioned 
officers and private soldiers, two were seamen, and 
one was a professor. The rest were burgesses, law- 
yers, and tradesmen. After prayer they adjourned 
to the next day, and then met formally, elected a 
president, and appointed a committee of fifteen mem- 
bers to prepare and bring in a draught of a constitu- 
tion, and to report progress to the assembly from day 
to day, and with the special instruction that practical 
measures only, and no general or abstract principles 
or propositions, should be considered or discussed by 
the committee. These men of business probably fore- 
saw that, even among them, the love of theory and 
philosophical discussion might lead the members 
to endless and useless debates and delay. By the 
12th of May the constitution was ready, had been 



CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLIES AND THE NORWEGIAN. 451 

considered paragraph by paragraph, revised, amended, 
passed, and was sworn to by Prince Frederick Chris- 
tian of Denmark on the 19th of May ; the constituent 
assembly dissolved itself, and the regular legislative 
body was elected. In six weeks this practically edu- 
cated people accomplished what the German consti- 
tuent assembly at Frankfort, composed of the most 
educated philosophic politicians of the most educated 
philosophic country in Europe, had been attempting 
to do, talking about, and debating upon, for more 
than twelve months, and at last entirely failed of 
doing. The political interests no doubt of the people 
of Norway were few and simple, and their numbers 
insignificant compared to those of the 40,000,000 of 
the new German empire ; but the principles and con- 
stitutional arrangements to be settled were very much 
the same. The independent existence of the legisla- 
tive branch of the state, its elections and meetings 
suo jure at stated times placed beyond the will or 
control of the executive branch ; the independence of 
the administrative or judicial branch, of the executive 
or legislative branches, and its being subject only to im- 
peachment by the lower house at the bar of the upper 
house of the legislature ; the sole power of making 
laws, or granting taxes, the suspensive veto only, not 
the absolute veto, on its enactments being conceded 
to the executive branch — these are points common 
to every liberal constitution, whether for a great or 
small population. The question of one chamber or 
two, in a country without any class of hereditary no- 
bility in the social body — a question which seems to 
perplex the political philosophy of the German and 
French constituent assemblies and of our own colo- 
nial department, in framing constitutions for coun- 



452 THE ARRANGEMENTS OF THE 

tries which have no element of aristocracy, no here- 
ditary nobility with the influence of property in the 
population — was very cleverly solved by this Norwe- 
gian constituent assembly, and in a way to which all 
countries with the land distributed among the popu- 
lation, and consequently without a class of nobility, 
as in the new state of Europe and in our own colo- 
nies, must recur. The whole body of representatives 
elect one third of their members to be the upper house 
with all the legislative rights and duties of a house of 
lords, but with no social rights or privileges beyond 
other representatives. The "leave to bring in a bill," 
the general policy of the measure proposed, must be 
brought before the general body of representatives 
(the upper house and lower house) sitting together. If 
leave be given, the upper house retires to its own 
chamber, the lower house discusses the clauses, and 
frames the bill, and sends it to the upper house. This 
house alters, amends, or adds to the enactments, or 
perhaps throws out the bill altogether, exactly as our 
House of Lords may do ; and by conferences between 
the two houses, adjustments are made, as in our 
houses of parliament, or the bill is lost if the two 
chambers cannot agree. By this ingenious arrange- 
ment of the body of representatives into three houses 
for legislation (viz. the upper deliberative chamber, 
equivalent to a house of peers ; the lower chamber 
for discussing and framing the special clauses or 
enactments of every bill ; and the united chambers in 
one house, in which all bills must be originated, and 
the policy of the bill discussed), no representative is 
deprived of his right to bring in a measure, whether 
he is in the upper or lower house. Practically this 
constitution has worked well. It affords many more 






CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY OF NORWAY. 453 

checks on ignorant, hasty, or factious legislation 
within the legislative body itself, than our British 
constitution. The suspensive, instead of the absolute, 
veto, is a source of concord, not of discord, between 
the legislative and executive powers. Three suc- 
cessive parliaments, that is, a period of at least nine 
years, must intervene before a measure can become 
law without the royal assent ; and surely a measure 
that has been nine years before the country, and has 
been discussed and enacted by three different par- 
liaments in succession, ought to become law ; and it 
cannot be said to be an infringement of any just or 
reasonable right of the executive in its legislative 
power, that the veto terminates. With an absolute 
veto, a constitution in Germany would be a mockery, 
or a scene of perpetual collision between the sovereign 
and the parliament. The Norwegian parliament 
abolished nobility, by the exercise of this ground- 
right ; and it cannot be doubted that an hereditary 
nobility of counts, barons, knights, in a population of 
peasant-proprietors, and who could have no property 
to support a superior rank in the next generation 
under the law of equal inheritance, would have been 
an element altogether unsuitable to their social state. 
Hamburgh is a city of merchants, but of merchants 
who do not, as in our great mercantile cities, grudge 
every moment that is not devoted to business. The 
pressure of competition is not so great T or the old 
monopoly movement in all trades and branches of in- 
dustry still lingers in the spirit and habits of men of 
business, and keeps mercantile action at a slow pace. 
It appears, at least to the idle traveller, that, after 
four or five o'clock, business seems suspended, and 
men of all classes hasten to eat, drink, amuse thein- 

G G 3 



454 LIFE IN HAMBURGH. 

selves, and enjoy what they have been toiling for all 
day. The idler, who likes to eat well, drink well, 
smoke a good cigar, enjoy good walks, and all the 
creature-comforts, innocent and non-innocent, of a 
great city, and for his intellectual enjoyments is quite 
satisfied with good theatres, good music, excellent 
coffee-rooms, plenty of newspapers, first-rate tables 
d'hote, and a constant stream of strangers from all 
parts of the world willing to talk, to amuse, and be 
amused, will do well to repair to Hamburgh. Nor 
is the expense of living in the best hotels exorbitant. 
About eight or ten shillings a day will cover all his 
expenses. That is about the average rate all over the 
Continent, for travellers who do not look like pigeons. 
The great fire swept off the street, the Jungfernsteig, 
in which, of old, the best hotels were situated, but 
these are rebuilt or rebuilding. When the traveller 
from England has got himself and his luggage out of 
the steamer into a boat, he is troubled with no cus- 
tom-house visitations. The waterman's fare is fixed, 
the porter's fixed, the drosky's or cab's fixed, and he 
buttons up his pocket with the inward satisfaction of 
knowing he has not been imposed upon, and drives 
to Streit's Hotel or the Alte Stad London, the most 
contented of travellers in those moments of landing 
and housing himself, which, in England, France, and 
all other countries, are the moments of the greatest 
and most frequent annoyance in the life of the human 
locomotive. The only trouble he may have at Ham- 
burgh is that, owing to the concourse of travellers 
on business from all parts of the world, he may not 
find room in the hotel he is recommended to. But 
there are scores of others, all good in their way, and 
very much in the same way. It is like the American 



THE HAMBURGH TABLE D'HOTE. 455 

way of hotel living as described by Dickens, but very 
much better. The bedrooms, indeed, are very small 
and Americanly furnished ; but big enough to sleep 
in, breakfast in, and write a letter in. Dinner, as in 
the American hotel, is the grand scene of life, the 
dinner salon the grand field of action. All live at 
the table d'hote, and not merely the lodgers in the 
hotel, but, as in America, many who reside, and have 
for years been permanently resident, in the town, dine 
regularly at the table d'hote, ladies as well as gentle- 
men. Dinner begins after 'change,, at four o'clock ; 
but unlike the American table d'hote dinner, its dura- 
tion is not to be measured by minutes of mastication 
and deglutition. Three good hours, at the least, are 
passed in the diligent exercise of the knife and fork, 
dish follows dish, course succeeds course, and all of 
excellent viands, all but the fish, excellent,, and rare. 
Pudding is served round. "Well, now we have got 
to the end at last." Alas ! simple John Bull, with 
thy notions of an English traveller's dinner, the per- 
petual mutton chop and mashed potatoes ! This is 
but an interlude, a song between the acts. The best 
of the dinner, the game, the venison,, the delicacies, 
are all to come. If there be any thing here below 
that knows no end, it is a Hamburgh table dlwte dinner 
at one of the first-rate hotels. Its finality, like that 
of the Reform Bill, is a beginning anew. The tra- 
veller knowing in the ways of the world in general, but 
not in Hamburgh ways, gets up when he sees a group 
on the move at last, and keeps his eye on them, to 
discover how and where the remnant of human life 
not occupied in dining is usually disposed of. A 
pavilion on the edge of a magnificent sheet of water 
within the city, a water square surrounded by streets, 

G G 4 



456 eainville's — altona. 

receives the coffee sippers and cigar puffers until the 
theatres open. This great piece of water, and the great 
fire of Hamburgh, must have had a league to spare 
each other. How a whole city of streets below the 
level of this vast reservoir, and close to it, should be 
consumed by fire, and the senate, burgomasters, and 
all other city authorities entrusted with its safety, re- 
main without punishment or reproach, must be a 
puzzle to the travellers of future generations. Here 
people lounge about on chairs, outside in fine weather, 
listening to an excellent band of music, looking at the 
pleasure-boats sailing on this urban lake, or at the 
passengers walking on the beautiful promenade along 
its margin. But this is only every day life in Ham- 
burgh. We must look at holiday life, at Tuesday, 
Thursday, and Sunday life also. These are gala days 
at Eainville's, and all the world are there. Rainville 
was a French restaurateur, who, at the beginning of 
the French revolution, when all the nobility emigrated, 
and Hamburgh was so full of them as to have its 
French theatre and Mademoiselle Contat acting in it 
every night, established himself with a brigade of 
first-rate Parisian cooks, at a large country-house near 
Altona, and entertained ail the world who preferred 
French cookery to sauer kraut. He succeeded so well, 
that all the Hamburgh hotel-keepers had to amend 
their ways of living and their old German cookery, 
and to furnish tables to please the taste of the public. 
The town of Altona, in Holstein, is about a mile and 
a half from Hamburgh ; and the spacious road be- 
tween, being a kind of neutral territory in police 
matters, is lined on each side with booths of the juste 
milieu dealers, who delight to traffic on the frontier 
between right and wrong, taking a step now and then 



THE ALTONA ROAD. 457 

on either side as it may suit their convenience. Old 
clothes' men, trinket-dealers, pedlars, brokers of all 
sorts of wares, showmen, music-grinders, stall- women, 
flower-girls, sailors, soldiers, blackguards and black- 
guardesses of every grade, idlers of every country, 
colour, and calling, are bustling, lounging, bawling, 
talking, between the Altona Gate of Hamburgh and 
the town of Altona ; and omnibuses, stool-waggons, 
carts, gigs, add to the buzz and confusion. The 
Boulevards of Paris are tame and silent compared to 
the Altona road. Nothing on this side the Strada 
Toledo of Naples is so rich in tongue-noises, costume, 
movement, and the small interests of life. The foot- 
paths are wide enough not to be disagreeably crowded 
by the throng, but the stranger winds his way slowly 
through the groups. Something attracts his eye at 
every step — perhaps a barrow- woman with a tray of 
beautiful, and possibly very rare, East Indian shells, 
which she has picked up from seamen just returned 
from distant voyages — perhaps a rosy innocent pea- 
sant girl of the Vierlander district, in her village cos- 
tume of woollen jupe and petticoat puffed out in ample 
plaits about the hips, but scarcely reaching below 
her knee, and displaying a leg in blue worsted which 
Taglioni might envy — perhaps a mountebank and his 
clown with countenances of ferocious depravity, voices 
hoarse with bawling, specimens of the fiendish, not 
of the angelic ; and beside them, perhaps, the contrast 
of a chubby, red-cheeked, fair and fat Danish peasant, 
a perfect picture of good nature, simplicity, honesty, 
and inactivity of mind and body. The traveller gets, 
at last, into Altona ; and in a step or two, he is at 
once out of this stir and bustle, and is standing at the 
end of a long deserted street, in which no living being 



458 ALTONA AND HAMBURGH. 

is moving. A house-dog sleeping in the sunshine 
on the door-step, sparrows chirping on the middle of 
the causeway over a lump of horse-dung, are all the 
life to be seen in a city intended to rival Hamburgh, 
better situated for trade than Hamburgh, having 
greater depth of water for shipping close to its 
warehouses, and which, if left to itself, would rival 
Hamburgh. But the paternal fostering care of an 
autocratic government endeavouring to regulate and 
encourage trade, but without a representation of the 
trading interests in its legislature to guide or keep 'in 
check the ignorance of the monarch's advisers and 
functionaries, keeps Altona in a torpid state. Going 
out of Hamburgh into Altona is like going out of the 
main street of a thriving market-town, on a market- 
day, into its churchyard. It is the self-government of 
Hamburgh which has raised it to its commercial im- 
portance. It may be reasonably doubted whether 
this commercial importance will be maintained, if 
Hamburgh is to be governed in its commercial rela- 
tions and arrangements by a minister of commerce, or 
board of trade, of the new German empire at Frank- 
fort or at Berlin. Capitalists will not readily engage 
in great affairs 'when their affairs are liable to be in- 
terfered with by measures of a distant government 
ignorant of their interests, and ready, perhaps, to 
sacrifice them for political objects deemed of more 
importance to the Germanic or Prussian nation. 
The trade of Hamburgh is not founded upon any 
manufactures or natural products of the country 
behind, like the trade of Liverpool, Newcastle, Glas- 
ow, nor upon any great population around which 
can only be supplied cheaply with what it consumes 
by way of Hamburgh, nor by any natural facilities of 



KAINVILLE'S. — TEA GARDENS. 459 

navigation in the Elbe, which has scarcely twelve feet 
water up to Hamburgh, and is not navigable to any 
extent above the town by river craft with any cer- 
tainty of regular transport. The trade of Hamburgh 
is founded totally and entirely on capital removable 
at once to Holland, Denmark, Belgium, or England, 
if it does not find that influence and self-government 
which merchants and capitalists require and possess 
over mercantile affairs in all countries in which com- 
merce flourishes. Interference and fostering care by 
the government of the new Germanic or Prussian 
empire, may soon reduce Hamburgh to the state of 
Altona. Empty as Altona appears compared to Ham- 
burgh, it has about 24,000 inhabitants. At the 
farther end of its long and empty streets stands the 
hotel, or Restaurant, of Rainville, on a bank of the 
river high enough to afford a view of its windings 
through the flat land of Hanover, and laid out in 
what is called on the Continent an English park or 
garden. Such English parks in Germany consist of 
ten or fifteen acres of copsewood intersected by ill- 
kept gravel walks twisting and twining towards some 
arbour, temple, duck-pond, or good point of view. 
In this German-English park from fifteen hundred to 
two thousand people, every gala-day in the fine season, 
dine, drink coffee, and lounge away four or five hours. 
They dine singly, or in parties, or at a table d'hote, 
and out of doors, or in small pavilions ; and all the 
department of the cuisine is considered admirable by 
those who are judges of it. A regular orchestra, as 
strong in numbers, and probably in talent, as that of 
any of our minor theatres, is part of this monster esta- 
blishment. Sundays and holidays are particularly 
gala-days at Rainville's, and the number of people who 



460 TEA-GARDEN LIFE. 

pass and repass, and take some refreshment, and come 
to talk with their friends or to listen to the music, 
must be immense. Ladies, children, and family parties 
of the middle and higher classes, form a considerable 
proportion of the company. So great an assemblage 
of the higher classes of a city, collected in one public 
place of entertainment open to every body who chooses 
to take a cup of coffee, or a glass of liqueur and a 
cigar, can scarcely be seen anywhere, even on the 
Continent. This tea-garden life — the sitting out of 
doors sipping coffee or tea, the ladies knitting or 
sewing and chatting, the gentlemen smoking their 
pipes and skimming over the newspapers, all en- 
tertained with good instrumental music, and a great 
assemblage of family parties around occupied in the 
same way — seems to be the summit of earthly felicity 
in German life. All ranks and classes enjoy an 
evening or two every week, in this way. The labour- 
ing people have their Rainville's too — their coffee, 
pipes, and music, in the open air, at hundreds of tea- 
gardens and houses of entertainment scattered over 
the environs. There is a simplicity, kindly feeling, 
and unpretending enjoyment in these family parties 
of the labouring people, sitting under the trees — the 
whole family, from the grandfather to the infant in 
arms, meeting together in an evening, once a week, 
in their best clothes, and best humour, and all 
gay and innocently merry without extravagance or 
boisterous excess. Such scenes give the traveller a 
favourable and just impression of the amiable dispo- 
sition of the German people. Why is it, he asks, 
that so many of our gentry, or would-be gentry, 
shrink with horror from mixing with the middle or 
lower classes in England in any place of public en- 



EASY INTERCOURSE. 461 

tertainment ? Is it that, in reality, many of our 
nominal gentry are only persons of wealth suddenly 
gentrified — persons who have acquired the fortune, 
rank, and social importance of gentry, before they 
began to take up the habits, manners, and mode of 
thinking and acting of the educated upper class, and 
feeling themselves just the same sort of persons as 
they were originally, and that the difference between 
them and the vulgar is not in mind, habits, and edu- 
cation, but in the conventional distinctions of wealth, 
they hate the profane vulgar and keep aloof from all 
intercourse with them, sensible that they themselves 
are at bottom of the same class, and that the difference 
is in the coat, not in the man ? On the Continent 
the different classes are more distinctly marked. The 
noble, the professional, the military man, the civil 
functionary, are fenced in by privileges, titles, orders, 
and conventional rank. They run no risk of being 
confounded with the lower unprivileged classes, and 
can afford to mix more freely with them. Wealth is 
not the measure of social influence as with us, either 
in reality or in public estimation, but the place, 
civil or military, which the individuals hold under 
government. The social importance and distinction 
which a man acquires for himself in trade, and which 
is measured by his wealth, and confirmed by the 
public opinion alone independently of government, 
can scarcely be said to exist, or to be acknowledged, 
in the social system of Germany. It is the main" 
spring of ours. In English life, men are never con- 
tented and happy unless in the struggle to attain 
some higher social position than they are in, and 
which the public confers. The merchant, the trades- 
man, the working-man, however easy in his circuin- 



462 RESTLESS AMBITION OF THE ENGLISH. 

stances and prospects according to his position in life, 
could not sit down, like the amiable contented Ger- 
man in the same station, to talk, and sip, and puff 
away three or four hours daily, or half a day perhaps 
every week, in the simple enjoyment of life, and of 
the physical good he can command. He is goaded on 
by the desire of attaining some higher social position, 
some greater good still, to which all that is really 
within his reach appears to him but the first step at 
which it would be folly to stop, and but the means of 
advance which it would be unpardonable waste to 
enjoy. Every weaver's son strives to be a Peel, or a 
father of Peels ; every grocer's, a Gladstone ; every 
operative's, a Cobden. In our social and political 
system there is nothing to make such a dream im- 
possible or extravagantly improbable, and therefore 
he dreams it, and lives in a struggle to realise it. The 
Continental man in the same class and position, would 
be mad indeed if he expected, by his utmost efforts 
and good luck to attain a higher social position, or 
greater social influence than what belongs to his 
original calling. Rothschild himself is a much greater 
man in London than in Frankfort — has much more 
of the social influence, esteem, and importance for 
which men strive, willingly accorded to him by the 
British public than he receives in Germany. This 
peculiar national spirit nourished by our social system, 
in which the lowest may rise to the highest station 
and importance, is the true source of our national 
prosperity and greatness. If the country were bank- 
rupt to-morrow, if all the wealth, manufactures, com- 
merce, and colonies of Great Britain were suddenly 
annihilated, and the people had to start afresh from 
a lower level than any Continental country stands 



CONTENTED ENJOYMENT OP THE GEKMANS. 463 

upon at the present day, this spirit would, in twenty 
years, place us again at the head of all commercial 
nations. It is, perhaps, at the expense of individual 
happiness that we attain and hold this national pre- 
eminence. Is this mercantile pre-eminence worth the 
price we pay for it ? This question is often discussed 
by foreigners, and generally determined by them in 
the negative. Let us look at the question fairly. 

It will not be denied by any traveller who has 
examined the way of living among the middle and 
lower classes abroad, that they enjoy a great deal of 
physical well-being — perhaps more than the corre- 
sponding classes with us at home. Every traveller 
can bear witness to the great amount of amusement 
and physical enjoyment, to the astonishing number of 
eating-houses, coffee-houses, dancing-rooms, concert- 
rooms, billiard-rooms, theatres, shows, and balls, in and 
about every town and every village, for the recreation 
of the lower, as well as of the middle and higher 
classes. He will bear testimony, too, to the general 
sobriety, decorum, and good behaviour towards each 
other prevailing in the company, even in the lowest of 
those places of public resort. It is not in the manners 
of the company that he sees any difference. All this 
is very delightful. We are charmed at this simple 
state of society, at this social enjoyment within reach 
of the lower classes, and so innocently enjoyed by 
them. We look with delight at their urbanity and 
mutual civility to each other ; at their happiness over 
their pipe of tobacco, cup of coffee, and really excel- 
lent music in a corner of the room ; and when we see 
them passing the evenings with their families at one 
of those places of public resort, so cheaply, innocently, 
and happily, we sigh to think of our gin palaces. But 



464 ADVANTAGES OF LABOURING MEN ABROAD. 

let us pause to consider the causes and the effects of 
this way of living, with all its ease, happiness, and 
enjoyment. How does it work on the physical, moral, 
and intellectual condition of this happy life-enjoying 
people ? The causes are soon recapitulated, and some 
of them have been already indicated in a preceding 
Note. The bread of the labouring, and even of the 
middle class is of rye, or half wheaten, half rye, flour. 
Rye is the cheapest of all crops, requiring but poor 
soils, and is ripe and harvested in July, before the 
summer weather breaks up. It is the most certain, 
therefore, as well as the cheapest of the cerealia for 
the bread-corn of a people. Garden stuffs, and not 
merely the potato, enter more largely into the daily 
diet of all classes than with us. Lodging for the lower 
and middle classes is cheaper, also, and better — tim- 
ber, bricks, and building-work not having such com- 
petition from manufacturing establishments all over 
the country, as with us, to raise their prices. Clothing 
materials, of woollen, linen, and mixed cotton and 
linen, for the labouring class, are generally produced 
and manufactured by each family for itself; but the 
clothing is neither so good nor so plentiful as that of 
our labouring class. Wages, in proportion to the cost 
of food, lodging, and clothing, are probably as good 
as in England. These are physical or material causes 
why the labouring class may, even with less wages 
than in England, enjoy much more of the luxuries 
and pleasures of the classes above them. There are 
other causes, arising from the social state of the Con- 
tinent. Manufacturing capital and movement are 
but in their infancy, and are fenced in from competi- 
tion, partly by the want of any great diffusion of 
capital, and partly by the dregs of the system of 



LEISURE WANT OF COMPETITION. EASY LIFE. 465 

monopolies or incorporations preventing the free use 
of capital, even where the restrictions of the middle 
ages on the exercise of trades are nominally abolished. 
Neither the working-man nor his employer is driven 
by competition to such unceasing labour, as with us, 
to maintain his ground. They have, both of them, 
more leisure to enjoy life than in our social system. 
The classification of society, also, being more strict 
and distinct, the class of employers, the middle class ? 
have less to strive for. They cannot pass into a 
higher class, however successful and wealthy. Nobility 
of birth, military rank, and government function in 
civil affairs, monopolise all social and political influ- 
ence and consideration, and leave nothing for industry, 
exertion, and success in the ordinary business of life 
to attain, but the animal enjoyments which wealth 
can command. The moral stimulus to successful in- 
dustry and great commercial action is, therefore, 
naturally wanting, where Avealth acquired by those 
means has not its just reward, in social influence, im- 
portance, and respect. If the nationality of the Ger- 
man people is to be sustained by commercial and 
manufacturing greatness, the present spirit and ar- 
rangement of German society, in which the acquisition 
of wealth leads to nothing but an easy life and the 
command of luxuries, but leads to no social distinc- 
tion and influence, must be altogether changed. The 
middle class will never be striving, nor the working 
class hard working, while they are excluded by con- 
ventional arrangements and by the spirit of society 
(which laws and constitutions of the state cannot alter) 
from consideration, influence, and advancement in 
the social body, beyond what may belong to them in 
their original class. From these causes, material and 

u ii 



466 EFFECTS OF THE EASIER LIFE ABROAD UPON 

moral, the man of the middle and of the lower class, 
the employer and the employed in all branches of in- 
dustry, leads an easier life on the Continent than with 
us, can give more leisure to his enjoyments, and has 
more means to expend on his enjoyments, having no 
object to save for or struggle for, but the animal 
comforts he is enjoying, and no competition to force 
him to perpetual exertion in his calling to retain what 
he has got. Climate, too, impeding out-of-door labour 
and the transport of goods for a portion of the year, 
gives a season of leisure in most occupations, a slack 
time unknown in our working-man's life. These 
causes have formed a temperament, it may be said, in 
the middle and lower classes of the German people, 
more refined, more capable of enjoying leisure and the 
jucunda oblivia vitce, and requiring these enjoyments 
more than that of our rough ever-working people. 
What are the effects which these causes produce on 
the comparative well-being of the people of the Conti- 
nent and of Britain ? Our delight at the innocent 
enjoyments and comparatively refined way of living 
of the middle and lower classes in Germany, cools down 
when we examine closely the effects of this life. The 
traveller will still have to sigh over the gin palaces of 
our great towns, and the squalor, misery, and desti- 
tution of great masses of our lower orders ; yet, taking 
the lower classes in Britain as a whole, and not mea- 
suring them by the fractional exception of the gin 
palace sots, or the inmates of the London, Edinburgh, 
or Liverpool alleys, he is surprised with the unex- 
pected fact which he cannot help observing, that 
physically the race of British labouring-men, viewed 
as a whole, stands very much higher in the well-being 
depending on sound health and strength of constitu- 



THE SANITARY CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE. 467 

tion than the German population. The medical man 
may estimate the sanitary condition of a population 
by the mortality among a given number of people, and 
by the nature of the prevailing diseases which have 
cut off the majority of the dead. The social economist 
looks at the living, not at the dead ; at the vigorous 
condition, bodily strength, capability of exertion, 
labour, and endurance, exhibited by the living mass. 
The amount of robust health, strength, and activity 
may be greatest in a body of men — for instance, a 
regiment, a garrison, or the whole population of a 
city or of a country — in which fever, or cholera, or 
various diseases, may have produced the greatest 
amount of mortality within a given time. There is a 
clear distinction between the medical and the econo- 
mical sanitary condition of a people. An East Indian 
population may be much more healthy, that is, free 
from disease and death, than an equal number of a 
European population ; but the strength, vigour, ac- 
tivity, and all that belongs to good health of the lat- 
ter, may be much greater than in the whole body of 
the former. This kind of health, this absence of a 
weakly condition or delicate constitution, is much 
more general in Britain than in Germany. The phy- 
sical defects of the people of Germany of the middle 
and lower classes, the vast numbers of deformed 
persons, of hunchbacks, crooked limbs, narrow chests, 
vaulted backbones, and of ruptured, decrepit, broken 
down persons of no advanced age, strike every tra- 
veller. The teeth, in general, are more decayed at 
five-and- twenty years of age, than among our popu- 
lation at fifty ; and indigestion and ill health follow 
very much the working of the stomach-mill in our 
jaws. The sedentary habits, the in-door life, tobacco 

ii n 2 



468 SANITARY CONDITION OF THE BRITISH 

smoke atmosphere in the stove-heated ill-ventilated 
rooms, the over-clothing and sensitiveness to cold 
and aversion from exercise, produced by the apparently 
happy way of living of the middle and lower classes 
in Germany, are not favourable to their physical con- 
dition, to their sound health and vigorous constitu- 
tion. The human animal somehow does not seem t& 
thrive upon the cup of coffee, the pipe of tobacco, 
the dolce far niente, and a sonata of Beethoven. That 
the physique of the German population is not in a 
satisfactory state is proved statistically, by the very 
great proportion of the young men called out for 
military service who are rejected on account of bodily 
defects, ruptures, malformation, or feebleness and in- 
capability of carrying arms. The standard of height 
is not regarded, as all are called out in some branch 
or other of the military service, and the Landwehr 
man can be placed in some kind of service, however 
short his stature ; yet in some districts, out of a 
hundred of the age to begin their military duties, 
sixty have been found, on inspection, unfit, and thirty 
in a hundred is not uncommon. This may be an ex- 
aggeration ; but it is not doubtful that in Prussia, 
Saxony, Wurtemburg, Baden, Hesse, the general ten- 
dency in the population to weakness of health, de- 
formity of body, and delicacy of constitution, has 
attracted the attention of the governments of those 
countries. The inefficiency of the military levies made 
each year bringing this physical deterioration visibly 
and strikingly before them, they have ordered gym- 
nastic exercises and teachers to be established in all 
the common primary schools, and a tournament 
system, as it is called, consisting of the practice of 
feats of agility and strength, to be introduced in the 



AND CONTINENTAL POPULATIONS. 469 

higher schools, as obligatory branches of education ; 
and avowedly that the children and youth of the 
country should be brought up more healthily and 
hardily, and that by bodily exercises enforced in the 
schools, the constitutional weakness and deterioration 
of the physical state of the population should be 
checked. We need no Act of Parliament to make our 
school-boys run, leap, and play ; and no professors of 
ground and lofty tumbling to make our youth take 
the exercise necessary to develope their bodily powers 
and activity. The young animal with us, be it rich 
or poor, prince or beggar, is sufficiently vivacious to 
take the exercise and play necessary for the health of 
its constitution and the development of its limbs ; and 
it has not a little superfluity, too, of the vis vitce and 
activity which seems wanting in the German youth, 
to bestow on all the neighbourhood, in all kinds of 
active tricks and mischief. With all the deteriorating 
influences of a manufacturing life widely extended, 
the British population is unquestionably in a higher 
animal condition than the German as to bodily health, 
strength, activity, hardihood of constitution, and 
capability of enduring fatigue, long-continued exer- 
tion, wet, heat, cold, and extreme hardship ; and, 
although comparatively uneducated, is much more 
clear-headed and energetic in real affairs, and of a 
judgment more exercised practically. This is a natural 
consequence of our population being bred in a more 
dense, complicated, and free social state, in which 
every individual has affairs and interests to guide, 
according to his own free judgment. Jn an agricul- 
tural population, individuals have fewer affairs de- 
pending on their own free individual judgment ; and 
on the Continent, the freedom of action and judgment 

H H 3 



470 MOKAL STATE OF THE POPULATIONS. 

is much more under superintendence and restraint. 
It is reasonable also to suppose that, estimating the 
moral state of two populations, it will be found that 
the more a man is a free agent, the more he is a moral 
man. There is an honesty of principle, and an honesty 
of police. The number of criminal offences may be 
smaller in a thinly scattered agricultural population ; 
but the amount of temptation and of superintendence 
must be taken into account, before awarding to such 
a population the praise of superior morality. In a 
densely peopled manufacturing country, the poor man 
who walks hungry past a baker's window filled with 
loaves, or through a crowded market teeming with 
food, and restrains himself from putting forth his hand 
to snatch what would allay his hunger, although there 
is no policeman watching him in particular, is a man 
more under moral influences and habits, and is in a 
higher moral condition, than one in the same state 
of starvation who is restrained from stealing because 
there is nothing to steal, or because his theft would 
be instantly detected where the people are less nume- 
rous, the number of articles exposed and the oppor- 
tunity to take them less, and where a hundred police 
eyes are watching him. It has been remarked in a 
former Note, that there is more of the virtues of 
honesty, and of moral restraint on conduct, exerted 
in the streets of London every day among its million 
and a half of people, than among the agricultural 
population of a country of ten times the number. The 
moral state of a country cannot be got at, by compar- 
ing its criminal lists with those of another country of 
equal population, for a given time. Such lists show 
the social, not the moral, state of the two countries. 
A penitentiary, a workhouse, a ship of war, a regi- 



HAMBURGH IN FORMER DAYS. 471 

ment, may show a smaller amount of criminal offence 
in a year, than a village of the same population, with- 
out proving that people under such discipline are in 
a higher moral state. 

When I first knew Hamburgh, about half a century 
ago, the ancient Hanseatic lady had much of old-fa- 
shioned courtlike state and etiquette about her. On 
great occasions, her senators in powdered wigs, velvet 
coats, silk breeches, and gold shoe-buckles, drove in 
gilt coaches of antique shape to the Eathhaus, and the 
town-guard of grenadiers and heavy cavalry turned 
out to present arms, with the accoutrements and ma- 
nipulations of the Thirty Years' War. Her fortifications 
were strong, according to the old style of strong places. 
High, brick-fronted, earthen-works formed a double 
cir cum valla t ion, with deep wet ditches ; and were cer- 
tainly not of the description that an enemy could walk 
over them. They were well kept up ; and sentries, at 
due distances, gave the appearance of an independent 
state. There was a decent, stately, solemn air about 
the city of Hamburgh, making up to the eye for the 
want of real importance and power. Since the eva- 
cuation of Hamburgh in 1814, by the French forces 
under Davoust, the Hamburgh senators have laid 
down their gilt coaches, peruques, and pomp of an- 
cient days — and perhaps they were right ; and have 
also laid down the ancient walls and fortifications of 
their city, levelled them, and converted them into very 
delightful public walks — and in this they were cer- 
tainly wrong. It may have been folly, at first, for 
the city of Hamburgh to build walls and surround 
herself with fortifications which she had not strength 
to defend, nor even troops to man ; but having them, 

H H 4 



472 MILITAEY IMPORTANCE OF 

it was still greater folly to dismantle and raze them. 
The Hamburghers thought that their fortifications 
were the attraction which, in the event of war in the 
North of Europe, would make the occupation of their 
city by one or other of the belligerent powers a mili- 
tary object, and that by getting rid of their walls 
they would get rid of military occupations, of sieges, 
and of all the evils inflicted on them by Davoust. 
They forgot that it was not their fortifications but 
the natural position of their city between the Alster 
lake and the Elbe, commanding the supplies of the 
richest country in the North for cattle, horses, and 
forage, and commanding the line from the Baltic to 
the North Sea, at the highest navigable point of the 
Elbe, that made, and always must make, their city 
the main military basis of all warlike operations and 
movements in this part of Europe. In the event of 
such a war, the first operation either of friends or 
foes would be to occupy Hamburgh. If the fortifi- 
cations had not been demolished, Hamburgh would 
not have been obliged to take a part in the unhappy 
war of 1848, against Denmark, would not have been 
obliged to open her gates to the bands of undisci- 
plined students, journeymen, and ragamuffins, calling 
themselves free corps in the cause of German unity ; 
but would have had the leisure, and the right, and 
the power too, to see her independence, and even her 
neutrality respected and her trade unmolested ; even 
if she had given a free passage through her territory 
to the regular troops of the other German states 
on their way to Holstein ; she would have had no 
Prussian garrison in 1849. 

Hamburgh and Lubeck, if the proposed German or 



HAMBURGH AND LUBECK. 473 

Prussian empire ever comes to be a reality, will ne- 
cessarily be converted into frontier fortresses of the 
first class, in which all consideration of commercial 
interests or accommodation must give way to the ne- 
cessity of military arrangements and defences. The 
two cities are within five days' transport of troops by 
steam navigation, from the arsenals and barracks of 
St. Petersburgh. They are the nearest points of the 
German empire, in any future military operation, to 
the centre of the Russian military power. On any 
other frontier troops must be marched, magazines es- 
tablished, military preparations made within the Rus- 
sian territory itself, long before any hostile movement 
could be undertaken against any part of the German 
empire. The world would know what was intended, 
weeks or months before any actual movement by 
Russia could be made. But no previous concentra- 
tion of troops, no visible preparation for hostilities are 
necessary, or can be previously detected, where all 
is ready at all times for instant military action, as it 
must be the case at the head quarters of the Russian 
empire ; and, therefore, Germany must at all times 
be prepared for defence on this her true Russian 
frontier. The military force which occupies the line 
from Lubeck to Hamburgh, and commands the Baltic 
coast with steam power, can advance into Germany 
at pleasure, upon any radius of a semicircle from the 
Baltic to the Elbe, has in its rear Holstein, Schleswig, 
Jutland, and the Danish islands, abounding in cattle, 
horses, forage, and all an army in the field requires, 
and alienated from German interests by the impolitic 
and unjustifiable warfare in 1848 and 1849, and has 
excellent positions to retire upon, if necessary, in 



474 MILITARY IMPORTANCE OF 

which, with the aid of steam power on the coast, a 
small body of troops can maintain their ground. The 
Danish army of 16,000 men, has maintained itself 
against the united Germanic army of 80,000 men, for 
two campaigns. This is the vulnerable part of the new 
European power, the united German empire, if such 
a power ever is to exist — the heel of the Achilles. 
In steam power on the Baltic, this German empire 
can never cope with Russia by any exertion. The 
naval means of the one power are existing, and con- 
centrated in its capital on the Baltic. The naval 
means of the other have yet to be created. Arsenals, 
docks, men, and money, are equally wanting. With- 
out a decided naval superiority in the Baltic, the new 
German or Prussian empire would have no frontier 
north of the line from Lubeck to Hamburgh, which 
could be defended. The line of the Eyder could not 
be maintained, and the more advanced line, which 
was claimed by the central power at Frankfort, the 
boundary of Schleswig and Jutland, would require a 
naval superiority in the North Sea as well as in the 
Baltic, or it would be turned by any hostile power. 
On the first outbreak of hostilities, Germany would 
have to abandon the whole country for which she 
has been contending and massacring the inhabitants, 
and would have to withdraw her troops to the only 
frontier she could defend — the line from Lubeck 
to Hamburgh. Her troops on her historical fron- 
tier of the Eyder or of Jutland, would be turned 
and cut off. 

In humanity, as well as sound policy, a state has 
no right to extend her dominion over territories which 
she cannot defend, whatever may have been her an- 



HAMBURGH AND LUBECK. 475 

cient historical boundaries. Defence is the compact 
between a state and the subject ; and if the state can- 
not fulfil the compact in the ordinary circumstances 
of war, the historical right must give place to the 
higher right of security to which the subject is en- 
titled. A German government could not defend the 
provinces it claims. 



476 COAST SCENERY INLAND SCENERY. 



CHAP. XVIII. 

NOTES ON THE SCENERY OF GERMANY. EFFECTS OF SCENERY ON 

THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY OF DIFFERENT NATIONS ON GER- 
MAN CHARACTER. THE PENINSULA OF SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN 

AND JUTLAND. THE LIMFIORD. ON THE GRADUAL RISING OF 

THE LAND ON THE BALTIC SIDE OF THE SCANDINAVIAN PENIN- 
SULA ON ROADS AND RAILROADS ON THE CONTINENT. 

FARM-HOUSES AND ASPECT OF THE COUNTRY IN HOLSTEIN. 

RIM OF FERTILE LAND ON THE SHORES OF THE NORTH SEA AND 
BALTIC. SURPLUS-LABOUR. — SURPLUS-LAND. — PAUPER COLO- 
NIES WHY UNSUCCESSFUL. STATE OF PEASANT-PROPRIETORS 

IN HOLSTEIN. — A PROTESTANT CONVENT SIMILAR INSTITUTIONS 

PROPOSED. PRETZ. PLOEN. EUT1N. VOSS. GOTHE. 

In all the bights and inlets of the North Sea coast, 
from the Seine to the Sound — in all its harbours, 
channels, or river mouths, the water-side scenery has 
few picturesque materials and little variety ; clay 
banks, mud dykes, chalk cliffs, sandy downs, reeds, 
willows, wooden piles, yellow water carrying yellow- 
sided barges with yellow sails bobbing up and down 
on yellow waves. The Dutch marine-painter makes 
something of such unpicturesque combinations of land, 
wood, and water, by the mere truthfulness of his re- 
presentation ; but the traveller finds little to admire 
in the reality of muddy rivers or harbours, the water- 
side lined with a row on each hand of brick ware- 
houses or ship-chandlers' premises, interrupted here 
and there with landing-places, vacant sites, timber- 
yards, embankments, or stairs held up by piles, be- 
tween which a thick gluey sludge oozes lazily at ebb- 



SCENERY IN GERMANY FLAT AND TAME. 477 

tide, reeking and stiffening in the sunshine, and making 
dirt itself more offensive. The Rhine, the Ems, the 
Weser, the Elbe, the Thames, show little else at their 
sea mouths and harbours. The pure blue ocean wave, 
breaking clear and white against a rocky coast, or 
thundering down upon the wide sweep of a firm sandy 
shore so bright that it seems always in sunshine, is a 
kind of scenery rare on the North Sea coast. It be- 
longs to the ocean coast of the Atlantic, on which the 
swing of the globe through the atmosphere seems, 
more than the wind, to raise the mountains of water 
which burst upon the rocky headlands. The Germans 
flock in summer to Ostend, or Nordstrand, or Heli- 
goland, as the Londoners do to Margate or Brighton, 
to see the ocean ; but it is not the ocean they see, it is 
not the ocean, at least, in its sublimity. They see 
but a pool of the mighty ocean. The land scenery 
within the North Sea coast, from the Seine or the 
Rhine to the Cattegat, is, in general, as tame, flat, 
and unpicturesque, as the waterside scenery. From 
the Baltic to the lake of Constance, from the North 
Sea to the Vistula, there are very few tracts of fine 
natural scenery. The general character of the land 
is flat, uninteresting, and without those accessories of 
fine old trees, hedge-rows, scattered cottages, green 
fields of old grass, gentlemen's parks and seats, which 
in England make even a flat country interesting and 
picturesque. Yet this land is Germany, the country 
of the most imaginative people in Europe. Can it be 
that this very want of fine natural scenery before their 
eyes, this absence of the sublime, the beautiful, or the 
picturesque in nature, is rather favourable than other- 
wise to the development of the imaginative faculty 
and poetical temperament among the German people? 



478 EFFECTS OF THE SCENERY OF A COUNTRY 

Switzerland produces no poets, although the Swiss 
are born and bred amidst poetic scenery the finest 
in Europe. The Highlands of Scotland produce no 
poets, although the scenery, men, and events of the 
Highlands furnish subjects to the imaginative faculty 
of innumerable poets born and bred in the Lowlands 
and towns. Can it be that the mind may become 
saturated by the habitual and familiar view of the 
objects of poetic fancy, may become torpid and inca- 
pable of receiving vivid impression or strong excite- 
ment from what is constantly before it? We admit 
this deadening effect of familiarity on imagination, in 
cases of human action. We admit the truth of the 
proverbial observation, that no man is a hero to his 
valet de chambre, or that the most beautiful female 
may be neglected by her husband, although admired 
by all but him. We expect no deep feeling, no pathos, 
no tragic power from the keeper of a gaol, who has 
daily before him the most pathetic scenes of real life. 
We allow that the feelings, sympathies, and suscep- 
tibility of being impressed and moved, may be blunted 
in those cases by familiarity. May it not be the same 
in the case of the poet and his imaginative faculty ? 
The constant supply of, and daily familiarity with, 
the real objects of the sublime, beautiful, and pictu- 
resque, around the inhabitants of a grand or beau- 
tiful country, may, perhaps, prevent the exercise of 
the imaginative faculty to create them for the mind. 
Memory only is required in their position, not imagi- 
nation. Fancy, or the creative power of imagination, 
is dormant and not exercised. This, too, would ac- 
count for the fact, that great readers and admirers of 
poetry, seldom prove great poets, or producers of what 
they admire. Memory, and not imagination, is the 



ON THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY OF THE PEOPLE. 479 

mental power exercised in their ectasies and enthu- 
siasms. 

The Germans are unquestionably the most imagina- 
tive people in Europe. German literature is scarcely 
a centur}' old. It was only about 1748, that Rabner, 
Hagedorn, Gesner, began their feeble attempts to pro- 
duce original compositions in the German language. 
What a vast body of German literature, and almost all 
of imaginative character, has been since created ! It 
can already vie in amount, and, in the opinion of many, 
in merit, with all the imaginative literature of all the 
other nations of Europe. But it is not only from 
their poetry, romances, novels, and such works of 
fiction, that the Germans may be deemed the most 
imaginative of the European people. They are more 
under the influence of imagination, and less under 
the influence of sober judgment, experience, and 
what we call common sense, than any other people, 
in their speculations in philosophy, politics, and the 
ordinary social affairs of life. The German phi- 
losopher, politician, professional man, and individual 
in private life, views things through an atmosphere of 
imagination, feeling, and enthusiasm, which generally 
magnifies and distorts what he is looking at, and 
leads him astray in his judgment and conduct. How 
many theories and speculations in religion, ethics, 
metaphysics, politics, issue yearly from the German 
mind ! All are more or less brilliant and novel ; in 
all there may be a nucleus of truth, but all are in- 
volved in a cloud of mystical expression, through 
which no distinct meaning is perceived by the reader. 
He must seek a meaning in his own mind, for he 
receives none that is distinct, from the author. The 
disciples of this mysticism are the more enthusiastic 



480 EXCESS OF THE imaginative faculty. 

because it is, in reality, their own impressions, feelings, 
or ideas, raised by vague imaginative expressions, 
that they embrace as the author's, and not any precise 
distinct meaning they have obtained from the author. 
They are properly the authors themselves, of what 
they adopt so enthusiastically as the author's meaning ; 
for no two of them understand in the same way the 
same theory or speculation. These are meteors which 
illuminate the world of German mind for a season, 
and then expire and are seen no more. This is the 
history of innumerable productions in philosophy and 
politics, which issue yearly from the German press, 
and which are in reality imaginative productions as 
much as their poetry — are imagination applied to those 
subjects to which other people apply sober reason, 
judgment, experience, and good sense. To this ima- 
ginative turn of mind must be ascribed the great im- 
portance attached by all Germans to the aesthetic, to 
all the fine arts and all connected with them, and the 
little importance attached to those practical evils in 
their social state, which would drive sober people 
mad. The German people live in a world of ima- 
gination ; and while they write, and talk, and sing, and 
make songs about German unity and liberty, and one 
great united German nation with one central constitu- 
tional government, and even fight nobly for the cause, 
or the imaginative idea, of this free united new Ger- 
many, they submit to the reality of a servile bondage 
in their Landwehr service, their functionary system, 
their passport system, their class-taxation, and in 
every social relation. 

From the Elbe to the Baltic, across the country 
by the high road from Hamburgh to Kiel, the distance 
is 12^ German, or 50 English, miles. The country 



PENINSULA OF JUTLAND. 481 

on the left of this line, the long peninsula between the 
North Sea and the Baltic, stretching out to the Scaw 
point, is a little terra incognita to modern tourists. 
No road leads through it to any other country. The 
route to Copenhagen has long been by sailing or 
steaming vessels from Kiel, or Travemunde, the port 
of Lubeck ; and the change of language from German 
to Danish after passing the Eyder, the bad state of 
roads and conveyances, and the want of objects of 
interest to the merchant or the idle traveller, have 
prevented visitors from exploring this tract of country. 
The late campaign of the Prussian troops in it may 
perhaps awaken some curiosity. The peninsula is 
not so very small. From Hamburgh to the Scaw must 
be a stretch of from 280 to 300 English miles, and the 
greatest breadth, viz. from Grenaaon the Baltic, over 
Wiburgto Lemwig, near the North Sea, is about 100 
miles ; but the breadth is very variable, owing to the 
numerous inlets of the sea on both sides. At one 
place a narrow neck of sand of a few paces in breadth 
divided the long inlet of the Baltic called the Limfiord, 
from the North Sea, until the year 1816. It has been 
washed away, and a new navigable channel into the 
Baltic, with about nine feet of water in it, has been 
formed, and is a good deal used by small vessels. The 
northern part of this peninsula is now an island, and 
the Limfiord, which enters into the land from the 
Baltic at the town of Aalberg, is now no longer a 
long deep bay of that sea, but a sound between it and 
the ocean. It is curious that this sudden and rather 
important change in the features of this country has 
been so little noticed by geologists. The narrow neck 
of sand which connected the whole peninsula into one 
continuous piece of land, existed in the 11th century, 

I i 



482 THE LIMFIORD. RISE OF LAND 

and apparently in the same state and dimensions as it 
was in until within these few years ; for the Nor- 
wegian king, Harold Hardraade, according to the 
Icelandic historical Saga, drew his ships across it in 
the autumn of the year 1061, when he was blockaded 
in the Limfiord by the fleet of the Danish king, and 
thus made his escape. It is only by the establishment 
of pilots and sound dues, by the Danish government, 
on this new entrance into the Baltic, that the world 
is made aware that a feature of the land, which has 
existed for 800 years at least without any change, 
has been so altered within these twenty or thirty 
years, and without any sudden convulsion, that where 
there was formerly a high road on the land, there is 
now a navigable channel with nine feet water in it. 

Is it not possible that the supposed gradual rising 
of the land above the level of the sea on the Baltic 
coast of Sweden, as first observed by Celsius about a 
century ago, while no such rise can be observed in 
actual progress at present on the ocean coast of the 
Scandinavian peninsula, may be a phenomenon pro- 
duced by the channels, connecting the waters of the 
ocean with those of the Baltic, becoming deeper or 
more numerous, and throwing a greater quantity of 
salt water into the basin of the Baltic ? If the Baltic 
were altogether fresh water, the difference between 
its level as fresh water, and as salt water, would be 
about 1 part in 40, that is, as the water became satu- 
rated with salt, the land would apparently have risen 
in proportion relatively to the water-level, and would 
be I inch above it, where formerly, when the water 
was fresh, there was a depth of 40 inches. The water 
becoming gradually Salter, the specific gravity is 
gradually altering, and the volume of it required to 



ON THE BALTIC COAST OP SWEDEN. 483 

maintain an equilibrium with the ocean outside of the 
Belts and Sound, is lessening in the Baltic and un- 
covering more of the land on its margin. If the 
Belts and Sound were filled up, and the little medi- 
terranean sea called the Cattegat were a tract of dry 
land, as it apparently has once been, forming a dam 
between the ocean and the Baltic, the evaporation in 
the climate of the Baltic would not be sufficient to 
keep this inland fresh-water sea within its present 
bounds, owing to the vast drainage of rivers and 
lakes disemboguing into it. Its level would be high 
enough to account for any appearances of the operation 
of water far above the present sea-level, without sup- 
posing one shoulder of the giant peninsula of Scan- 
dinavia to be gradually rising above sea-level, about 
the Gulf of Bothnia, by some partial upheaving from 
beneath, and the rest of the mass along the ocean 
coast to be quiescent. If the increase or diminution 
of the saltness of the water in the Baltic, according to 
the influx from the rivers in its upper end, where the 
rise of the land has been observed for about a century, 
would be sufficient to produce a difference in the 
specific gravity and level of the waters of the Baltic, 
in different ages, it would account for the phenomenon 
of a gradual rise of the land by the fall of the level of 
the water. If the Baltic could ebb out and flow full 
with the ocean, and become altogether sea- water, the 
land around it would appear to have risen consider- 
ably above the present sea-level, as a smaller volume 
of salt water in its basin would be required than the 
present volume of brackish water, to be in equilibrium 
with the sea. 

There is a good macadamised road from Hamburgh 
to Kiel ; and before the railroad was opened the dili- 



484 CONTINENTAL ROADS. — CARRIAGES. 

gence was superior to any public carriages in Ger- 
many. The Continental diligence in general is, in 
respect of windows, light, and air, very little supe- 
rior to the conveyances in which our police take their 
prisoners to jail. These Danish or Holstein diligences 
ran daily, were roomy, had large, good windows, were 
driven four-in-hand, the horses equal to any in our 
well-horsed coaches, the harness of leather, the driver 
in red, with a time-piece, and his time for each stage 
fixed and marked in a way-bill, and the rate of 
travelling about six English miles an hour. This is 
not flying, but it is the nearest approximation to flying 
the traveller meets in post wagen, eilwagen, or any 
public conveyance in Germany. Forty years ago, 
when I first knew this road, the ordinary course of 
travelling was to pass a night between Hamburgh and 
Kiel, even with extra post, for at least three fourths 
of the year. In those days the stuhlwagen, a long 
canoe of basketwork and boards, without springs, on 
four wheels, with a hood like a taxed cart's in the 
middle, and cross seats of wood, like the benches for 
rowers in a boat, suspended by leather thongs to re- 
iterate every jolt, steered its weary way with its load 
of passengers and luggage, through a head-sea of ruts, 
mires, holes, and boulder stones, taking every now and 
then a short cut, of a mile or two about, across stubble 
fields and ploughed land, to avoid the impassable 
direct road, and, after struggling and floundering 
through an ocean of mud, made a providential arrival 
at the haven of a post-house, at the speed of two 
miles an hour of daylight. First came a good maca- 
damised road through the country — a real improve- 
ment. Next came a railroad, ruining the other road 
by taking away the traffic of passengers and goods 



RAILROADS AND COUNTRY ROADS. 485 

which supported it. It may be doubted if this be 
genuine improvement. It is not the gradual healthy 
improvement called into existence by the gradual ad- 
vance of a country in wealth, activity, and industry, 
but an imitative precocious improvement. England 
began with macadamised roads and cross roads, and 
conveyances upon them for goods and passengers in 
every direction, to every village, to every pore in the 
industrial body. Then came railroads, subsisting by 
the excellent roads on every side of them, and feeding, 
not starving, the other roads, being formed to meet 
an existing demand for a speedier and cheaper trans- 
port of goods and people through the country on 
main lines of business. Capital, industry, and trade 
had gone before, and prepared the way. But on the 
Continent all these are to come after. The only 
foundation on which the improvement of a railroad 
in any country can permanently stand, is the industry 
of the country ; and this is here to be produced by 
the railroad. Railroads on the Continent are to be 
causes instead of effects of social activity and wealth ; 
and are to be so in countries in which industry, en- 
terprise, and capital are not in existence, or, if ex- 
isting, walk in fetters under government regulation 
and interference. If the railroads, even in England, 
flourished only by taking the means and traffic by 
which other roads, the cross-country roads and the 
whole network of communications now covering the 
land, are kept up, they would be of doubtful benefit 
to posterity. Sixty years ago, railroads would have 
been prejudicial in England, the country not being 
prepared, not being roaded as it is now, so as to have 
common roads and railroads working together, and 
with mutual advantage to each other. 

i i 3 



486 FARM-HOUSES IN HOLSTEIN. 

At Langenfelde, a hamlet of three or four houses, 
a few miles from Altona, the diligence, now super- 
seded by the locomotive, drove into a farm-house, with 
vast folding doors on each gable-end, wide enough to 
admit two carriages to pass each other, and covering 
a great portion of the high road inside its walls, and 
having a row of lodging rooms on each side, the whole 
covered with a vast steep roof of thick reed or rye- 
straw thatch. This is the Holstein Custom House, 
at which the luggage is opened and examined for 
duty-paying articles, an operation gone through with 
great civility and despatch, without a fee, and without 
any trouble that a reasonable traveller could justly 
complain of. The French, Belgian, and English cus- 
tom-house examinations, are much more annoying and 
vexatious. This house being exactly similar to all 
the ordinary farm-houses in Holstein, not larger, and 
laid out in the same way, I had the curiosity to 
measure it roughly while my luggage was being re- 
placed. The length inside, from one gable-end door 
to the other, was about 112 feet, the breadth of the 
carriage-road, inside the house, about 30 feet, and 
a row of seven rooms on each side of it, of 12 feet 
in depth, would make the inside breadth 54 feet 
between the side walls. The whole of this is roofed 
over with one massive volume of thatch rising with 
a steep slope to a great elevation. The side walls, 
which are of bricks in wooden frame- work, are not 
above 10 feet high, and there are no upper lodg- 
ing-rooms. The vast area above, under the roof, is a 
great store-room or loft for grain, roots, hay, and the 
winter provender for the cattle. This house, being a 
post-station and custom-house, has seven rooms on 
each side, but in the ordinary peasants' houses of the 



INTERIOR OF THE FARM-HOUSES. 487 

same size, the dwelling-rooms occupy one side only, 
and the cattle, horses, and live-stock, occupy the op- 
posite side, the carriage-road through the house run- 
ning between. The waggons, harness, utensils, stock, 
and crop, and all the farmer's gear, are under the 
same roof in this huge ark of a dwelling, and always 
under the farmer's eye ; for his family rooms, which 
are well lighted from the gable-end and side walls 
with abundance of windows in rows, have windows 
also into the hall, or interior area, in which his cows 
and horses, poultry, pigs, and utensils are lodged. 
The spaciousness of these farm-houses, the abundance 
of window-lights by which the inmates can see to 
be clean, and the cleaning and scouring habits of the 
people, formed, no doubt, by the absence of all dark 
corners for dirt to be hid in, make this arrangement of 
house and household by no means so unsuitable as we 
would suspect for working proprietors. The habits 
of the people are good and cleanly, and it is an ad- 
vantage that the labourer lodges and lives with his 
employer under the same roof, although in different 
apartments. The parlour of a Scotch tenant, paying 
two or three hundred a year of rent, does not show 
more cleanliness, order, arrangement, and comfort, 
than is seen in the farm-houses here, nor so much, in 
all that regards their cattle, horses, and farm utensils, 
which is the great test of a good farming spirit. No 
district in Scotland raises such good horses as Hol- 
stein, and no horse-fair in Scotland shows such an 
average of good horses as the fairs of Kiel, Ploen, 
Eutin, Itzehoe, and others in this district. A family 
with its servants and farm-stock under one roof, can 
do more work and attend to small things better — and 
on small things, farming, especially stock-farming, 

i i 4 



488 INTERIOR OE THE E ARM-HOUSES. 

whether horses, cattle, or sheep be the stock, mainly 
depends — than where they have to run from place to 
place to do their work, and, in some place or other, 
must be out of sight of the master or mistress, who 
have the greatest interest in their work. The hus- 
bandry of the Holstein farmer turns mainly on his 
live stock, especially his horses, which are sought 
for over all Europe to mount cavalry officers, and on 
his cattle and dairy produce, which find a ready mar- 
ket in Hamburgh ; and in stock farming, the master's 
eye is proverbial, in all countries, for its fattening 
powers, and the mistress's is not less celebrated for 
its extraordinary faculty of curing butter or meat to 
perfection. It puzzles the traveller to make out how 
the smoke escapes from some of these farm-houses, 
which appear to have no chimneys in the gable-ends, 
and no visible outlets or stack of chimneys in the 
centre for smoke to escape by, and yet, have no ap- 
pearance of smoke or of soil from it in the house. It 
seems, that, immediately under the ridge of the roof, 
there is a rauchkammer or smoke-room, from end to 
end of the roof, for hanging beef, hams, sausages, or 
black-puddings, which enter largely into family con- 
sumption in Germany among all classes, and are an 
important object of farm produce for sale in the towns. 
Into this loft or smoke-room, all the pipes of the 
stoves conduct the smoke of the house, and it impreg- 
nates the meat and smoke-cures it. On each end, in 
the gables, there is a little hatch or open window in 
this loft, through which the smoke escapes, at its lei- 
sure, out of this smoke reservoir, without coming down- 
wards through the funnels or loft-floors and annoy- 
ing the inhabited regions below. The high-peaked, 
densely and neatly thatched roofs, embosomed in 



ENGLISH ASPECT OF THE COUNTRY. 489 

beech trees, with trim gardens before them — the gentle 
swells of land crowned with groves, or ploughed all 
over, and divided by live hedges into fields of all 
shapes and sizes, with footpaths across them, just as 
in England, give the best parts of Hoist ein a very 
English look, an appearance very unlike any other 
part of Germany ; and, knowing this to be the mother 
country of the English people of the south and middle 
of England, we willingly fancy that the houses, 
the land, and the landscape, are English all over. 
And it is not merely fancy. It really is very like 
English scenery in Bedfordshire, Rutlandshire, or 
Huntingdonshire. It has a very English look. The 
greatest difference, perhaps, is, that here, between the 
gentle swells of land there is more frequently a sweet, 
quiet, little lake or pond, reflecting the trees on its 
banks, and, among the house-tops of the hamlet, that 
stranger to English scenery, the stork, is sailing about 
or standing on one leg, half-domesticated, upon the 
roof. The extent of good land, however, on this line 
across the country is very small. It is the great pe- 
culiarity of England among European countries, and 
one main cause of her greatness compared to her small 
extent, that she is fertile all over, and not merely in 
her low grounds, valleys, depressions, and coast or 
river sides. Her fertility is not, as in Scotland and 
in all the Continental countries, a mere rim around a 
sterile back sticking up in her centre and running 
out into many barren prongs — a mere selvage of silk 
around a petticoat of dowlas. Her garment is alto- 
gether silk. Here the breadth of good fertile land is 
very narrow. About four miles back from the Elbe, 
on leaving Altona, the soil begins to be a thin, meagre, 
peaty earth upon a barren subsoil of mere sand, and 



490 FERTILE RIM OF LAND ON 

even the heath and weeds are of stunted growth. The 
Segeberger heyde, or moor, is part of this sterile back 
of the peninsula, and it extends from the Elbe north- 
wards to the Scaw point, with more or less breadth 
and sterility. The river Stor and its branches rise in 
this southern part of the back of the country, and fall 
into the Elbe near Gluckstad. It is navigable for 
small craft as far as Itzehoe. On the other side of it, 
the Trave and its branches rise and run into the Baltic 
at the Gulph of Lubeck. The Alster runs through 
the city of Hamburgh into the Elbe. These are but 
small and sluggish streams. It is only in the de- 
pressions of the country where they run, and along 
their borders, that the land can be reckoned fertile. 
The huge back of the country, although of very little 
elevation above the sea — so little, indeed, that it is 
only perceptible by the outfall of the waters towards 
different sides — is of almost hopeless sterility of soil, 
or, at least, as much so as Hounslow Heath, which 
it resembles in quality. Here and there along the 
streams, and little lakes or ponds, which they form in 
their sluggish course, as at Bramstadt, Neumunster, 
and other villages, a little better soil appears, but the 
mass of the land produces only a stunted twiggy 
heath, which scarcely flowers, and could not support 
cattle or sheep like heathy moor-land in Scotland. 
This kind of land prevails to within two or three miles 
of the Baltic shore. The traveller then comes, rather 
suddenly, out of this barren tract, and enters within 
the rim of fertile land which skirts the shores of this 
peninsula on either side. On the North Sea side, 
from the Elbe to the Eyder, this skirt of fertile land, 
called Ditmarsh, is of considerable breadth, perhaps 
ten or twelve miles, and is a district of the richest 



THE BALTIC AND NORTH SEA COASTS. 491 

soil in the north of Europe, and is inhabited by a 
wealthy peasantry, who are proprietors of the land, 
and have no nobility or feudal estates among them. 
They struggled for and maintained a kind of inde- 
pendence from feudal rights over them in the four- 
teenth century, and to a late period were exempt even 
from import duties on articles to be consumed in 
Ditmarsh. The rim of fertile land on the Baltic coast 
is not so broad nor so good in quality as Ditmarsh, 
but it produces wheat, rye, barley, and other crops 
in abundance. Buckwheat is a common crop here, and 
seems the last in the rotation of crops, or taken from 
land exhausted and to be laid down to wheat or rye, 
with manure, next season. The buckwheat is much 
used in cakes, puddings, and soups ; and, although the 
flour does not rise and admit of being baked into 
bread, it is, in the food of the people, almost as much 
used as potatoes. The main mass of the land, the 
back of the peninsula down to the fertile rims on each 
coast, is of so poor a quality, that it could not cer- 
tainly afford a rent for the use of it ; yet, here again, 
we see that a family working on such land, be it ever 
so barren, for their own living only, may undoubtedly 
live upon it, or, at first, starve upon it by inches, as 
proprietors of the spot of barren soil. No man could 
hire labour to apply to such land even if it were his 
own, yet he will apply his own labour to it, especially 
if agricultural labour is not in much demand around 
him. His toil will gradually fertilise even such land, 
for the foot of man carries fertility with it. Where- 
soever man has dwelt or dug, should it have been a 
thousand years ago, there will be a lively green trace 
visible, even in the sandy desert or in the bosom of the 
heathery mountain. Every succeeding generation 



492 SURPLUS LAND. — SURPLUS LABOUR. 

of the labouring proprietor, on such barren waste 
land, is coming nearer and nearer to a better living 
and a higher remuneration for their labour. It is 
undeniable, that as an employment for money-capital 
laid out on the improvement of such barren land, the 
slow progress would never answer the returns required 
for money, would never repay the landowner for his 
outlay and the interest of it ; but as an employment 
for labour-capital, the returns might answer exceed- 
ingly well, both for individual well-being and national 
wealth. There is a great quantity of unemployed 
labour and a great quantity of unemployed land 
in Great Britain ; and the one cannot be applied 
to the other so as to make a profitable return for 
money employed in hiring the labour to cultivate the 
land. But, dropping the third element, the profitable 
employment of the money, if the surplus labour of 
the country were applied to the surplus land — by sur- 
plus labour and surplus land, I mean the labour and 
land which cannot be applied to each other so as to 
yield a profit or rent to the landowner, although the 
land would subsist the labourer — a vast population 
of labourers now in pauperism would be supported 
by their own labour as land proprietors, poorly sup- 
ported, no doubt, and, at first, wretchedly supported, 
but still supported in proportion to their industry in 
cultivating the land, and with the certainty of an im- 
proving subsistence before them. A vast extent of 
land now idle, because it can yield no rent or profit 
for money laid out on it within five-and-twenty years, 
would be yielding to the country a subsistence for avast 
population living by their own labour laid out on it. 
Money-capital is not the only element in true national 
wealth. Labour-capital, the amount of labouring 



CULTIVATION OF BARREN LAND. 493 

power subsisting itself in a country, is altogether as 
important, and the land which may subsist it, although 
not of a quality to afford a rent or profit to money- 
capital, is still a portion of the national wealth, be- 
cause capable of giving subsistence to a portion of the 
nation. But to apply the labour to the land, the land 
must be the labourer's own. No allotment system, 
with payment of price or rent, either at present or in 
future, can succeed. The land can only subsist the 
labourer, but cannot subsist him and yield a surplus 
also for rent or profit, as it is only of the lowest 
quality of land we are speaking. A future price or 
rent from such land is not just in principle, because 
the future value is, in reality, the accumulated value 
of the labourer's own work upon the land, and be- 
longs to him. He has been for half his life living 
poorly, and accumulating all his labour and thrift in 
the improvement of his land. This land was his sav- 
ings bank for all his labour, it has received all its 
value from his labour, and a rent on that value would 
not be just. Poor colonies have been attempted here 
in Holstein, — that is, the settling of pauper families 
on poor lands, — but they have only partially succeeded, 
because they were established on a false principle. 
The pauper colonist was not made at once pro- 
prietor of his lot of land, but was settled only as a 
contingent proprietor, who had a load of debt to re- 
pay by his labour to the general concern, before he 
was put in full possession of his land and had the full 
use of his own labour to apply to it. He had neither 
the stimulus of property nor the command of his time 
and labour to apply to the lot of land, nor the cer- 
tainty that he would, within any reasonable time, be 
able to fulfil the conditions required to make it his own. 



494 PAUPER COLONIES I 

But the plan itself of poor colonies would succeed, 
if not overlaid and smothered as it was in Belgium, 
Holland, and here, by regulations, superintendence, 
and functionaries. If a lot of land and a spade, seed- 
potatoes and seed-corn, six or eight bolls of meal for 
subsistence, and wood for a roof and door, were given 
to a labouring man on an English waste, in Epping 
Forest, for instance, or the New Forest, which are in 
a state of waste, the man would no more starve 
or return to pauperism, than if he had a lot of land 
given him in Canada. Exmoor or Dartmoor, given in 
free proprietorship, would support a large number of 
colonists. Many of the small plots of land on the 
verge of this vast Segeberger heyde are evidently culti- 
vated by owners, who do contrive, with much waste, 
no doubt, of time and labour, to raise a patch of rye 
alongside of the native stunted heath. If the time 
and labour could be more beneficially employed, it 
would be pure waste to bestow them on this attempt 
at cultivation ; but where is the waste if the man's 
time and labour can be employed in no other way? 
That is precisely the case here, from the want of 
manufactures to employ the labouring population, and 
precisely the case in England, from the excess of la- 
bour beyond the demand for its products in manufac- 
turing industry. It is no waste of labour in such 
circumstances, to employ the surplus unemployed la- 
bour in cultivating the poorest soil, such as will barely 
return the seed and a little more to subsist the la- 
bourer until next crop, even should there be no sur- 
plus produce from the land to pay rent. This would 
still be gain to the labourer and to the country, and 
would relieve the pressure of poor-rate and the pres- 
sure of labour on employment, and at much less ex- 



WHY UNSUCCESSFUL. 495 

pence than by any emigration scheme. It is true, 
the labourers would gain very little money by their 
labour on their own crofts of land, but they would 
gain their own food, and their own clothing also, out 
of their land. The food and clothing from their own 
home-made stuffs of wool and flax would be more 
rude, but the man and his family would be fed and 
clad in some way, and this is more than manufactur- 
ing employment can always do for its labouring popu- 
lation. Home-made clothing is almost universally 
used by the country people in Germany, even of a 
class above common labourers. A very small per 
centage of our labouring population have any article 
of their raiment, except it may be their stockings in 
some districts, that is home-made, or even village- 
made. All comes from the factory. I met, one day, 
at Bramstadt, a small village on the road to Kiel, a 
party of young men, twenty- seven of them, in four 
waggons, returning from a wedding in their holy- 
day clothes, and only two wore cloth, which ap- 
peared, from the finish of it, to have been regularly 
dyed, pressed, and manufactured in a factory. They 
were clad in home-made woollen and linen, warmly 
and respectably clad ; and, except the hat and silk or 
cotton neck-handkerchiefs, all their clothing seemed 
home-made ; and their capital horses and trim wag- 
gons showed that they belonged to the better class of 
peasantry. This is no unhappy state of society for 
the labouring class of a country, who are, after all, 
the majority ; and it is no waste or misapplication of 
their time and labour, to be raising their own food 
and clothing material, and manufacturing their own 
cloth by their family work, if their time and labour 
cannot be employed by the manufacturing capitalist 



/ 



496 STATE OF THE HOLSTEIN PEASANTRY. 

at wages that would enable them to be better fed and 
better clothed, while producing articles of higher 
commercial value. National wealth and national well- 
being are too often confounded by political economists, 
and treated in their theories as one and the same 
thing. But the well-being of a nation does not so 
much consist in the accumulation of great wealth in 
the hands of a few, or even of a very numerous body 
of capitalists in a country, as in the right distribution 
of a much less amount of capital and property among 
the people at large. The former may be national 
wealth in the sense of being available by taxation to 
the revenues of the state, and thus increasing and 
constituting its strength, wealth, and resources ; but 
the latter is true national wealth in the sense of 
great material well-being, a good moral and intellectual 
condition, and a general exemption from want being 
diffused through and enjoyed by all the community. 

A kind of pauper establishment — it may be imper- 
tinent to call it so — for a class of poor very numerous 
in England, and suffering as much real distress as the 
most destitute, the poor unmarried gentlewomen of 
the country, who, according to the common expres- 
sive phrase, " can neither work nor want, " is within a 
forenoon's ride of Kiel, and well deserves the considera- 
tion of the traveller. At Pretz, a beautiful little 
town on the stream called the Schwentine, which 
expands here into the Lanker Lake, there was, in 
Catholic times, a convent for nuns of noble family, 
established, it is supposed, about the year 1216, and 
very richly endowed with land in the vicinity by a 
Count Orlamunde and other noblemen. There was 
no Henry VIII. here at the Reformation, to seize on 
the monastic lands, and confer them on his favourites ; 



A PEOTESTANT CONVENT. 497 

and the Holstein nobility had a direct interest in 
preventing a conventual establishment that was of 
service to their own order, from being broken up for 
the benefit of individuals. They retained it as a kind 
of Protestant nunnery. The following is the present 
arrangement of this establishment: — It consists of a 
dean, or dignified clergyman, to take charge of the 
estates and affairs ; a lady-prioress, and thirty-nine 
convent-sisters, who live in separate small genteel 
houses, each having her own establishment and house- 
keeping, and her separate income to live upon, on the 
footing of our fellows of colleges. They go into the 
world, visit their friends, partake of all social amuse- 
ments, and are only bound to residence for a certain 
portion of the year ; and to certain rules of dress, 
attendance on chapel, and similar regulations, when 
they do reside, in the same way as our fellows of a 
college at Oxford or Cambridge. When a nobleman 
finds he has more daughters than he can provide for, 
he enters the name of one of them at her birth, or in 
early infancy, on the convent books, and pays yearly 
a certain small stipend ; which, if the child dies, or 
has succeeded to other prospects in life, goes to the 
funds of the establishment. At the age when educa- 
tion begins, the child is placed with one of the convent 
sisters to be educated and brought up at the expense 
of the establishment. No expense is spared. Music, 
dancing, languages, and all female accomplishments 
are taught ; and the young lady, at a proper age, goes 
into society, to concerts, balls, plays, parties, with 
her convent sister as her matron or mother. It is 
not at all uncommon that the young lady gets an 
offer of marriage which she accepts of; and being 
brought up, not at a boarding-school, nor in a con- 
ic K 



498 "A PROTESTANT CONVENT. 

vent secluded from society, but in a private house in 
which her convent-mother has her own housekeeping, 
her own social circle, and her own separate income 
to live upon, she is a well educated lady, and well 
prepared to become an excellent wife and mistress of 
a family. Many of the first nobility of the duchies 
of Holstein and Schleswig, have married young ladies 
brought up in those conventual establishments. There 
are several of them, but this of Pretz is the wealthiest. 
If the young lady marries, she of course leaves it, 
and her benefit and interest in it as a member ceases. 
If she remains single, she continues in it ; and in 
course of time succeeds by seniority to a vacancy in 
the number of convent sisters, enjoying in the mean 
time a comfortable home and certain living ; and oc- 
cupying herself, as unmarried ladies usually do, in 
the education of the younger girls, visiting, church- 
going, living, in short, as fellows of a college do, who 
are sometimes resident, sometimes not, but partaking 
in all amusements and pleasures of good society. If 
one of these ladies, by the death of relatives, or other- 
wise, succeed to an income of a certain amount, it is 
understood that she is to make room for a successor. 
This conventual establishment of Pretz has very 
extensive estates, and even villages, in the most fer- 
tile tract of the country on the side of the Baltic, 
and it is said the population on its property exceeds 
5000 persons. The land, with which it was endowed 
early in the 13th century, may be just as well, for 
the good of the community, in the hands of such an 
establishment, its income supporting thirty or forty 
families expending it on the spot, as in the hands of 
half a dozen counts or barons expending it in Paris or 
London. The vulgar prejudice against Church estates 



ADVANTAGES OF THE ESTABLISHMENT. 499 

may probably be a one-sided view of the effects on 
general well-being of such appropriations of the land 
of a country. Church-tenants are seldom the worst 
off among tenantry. To the population on the land, 
the tenants, their families, and labourers, to the 5000 
in this instance, it may be beneficial to be under a 
corporate body, and not subject to the vicissitudes 
and exigencies which often oblige an individual land- 
lord to raise his rents suddenly and unreasonably, or 
to eject his old tenants. They have more certainty 
in their tenure. In the middle ages, the tenants on 
Church lands, not only introduced improvement in 
husbandry and gardening, but by their exemption in 
general from the military servitude for their farms, 
and even from the inflictions and exactions of war in 
petty quarrels of nobles with each other, they kept 
alive the right to peaceful occupation of land in some 
considerable portion of every country. In the pre- 
sent times England perhaps would be the better of 
some establishments similar to this one of Pretz. 
Suppose the bishops, the Crown, and the nobility were 
to renounce such lands as before the Reformation 
belonged to convents and other monastic establish- 
ments ! Those of the clergy or other classes, who 
think that the Reformation went too far, would only 
be acting honestly in renouncing all profit from what, 
even in this foreign Lutheran land, was respected as 
property not to be confiscated and appropriated to 
private individuals, or to the augmentation of clerical 
revenues, but, as far as consistent with the Reforma- 
tion and Protestant religion, to be applied to the pur- 
poses of social or religious interest for which they 
were originally intended. It might perhaps be pos- 
sible, even without the ancient monastic estates and 

Iv K 2 



500 SIMILAR INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 

endowments from which these establishments in some 
of the Protestant countries of the Continent arose, or 
rather were continued with a few alterations after 
the Eeformation and the suppression of convents as 
religious communities, to form similar establishments 
in England with great advantage. Life assurance 
does not afford the same benefit to female children as 
such an institution would do ; for what is the girl to 
do with the thousand pounds or two payable to her 
by the Life Assurance Company on the death of her 
parent ? It requires all the experience, acuteness, 
and foresight of a man bred to business, to lay out a 
small capital, in our days, so as with safety to derive 
an income from it. In an establishment like this one 
in Holstein, the parent would have the satisfaction of 
seeing the home, the society, the means and mode of 
living of his daughters, if they remained unmarried ; 
of having their education provided for ; and of knowing 
that distress or discomfort arising from poverty, want 
of a home, or from a dependent situation, could never 
force them into ill-assorted marriages ; and that they 
would have the advantage of living and being edu- 
cated, in that kind of good society in which they 
might form suitable marriage engagements. The 
spendthrift or the mercenary would scarcely look for 
wives bred in such an establishment and bringing no 
fortunes to their husbands, nor would the ladies be very 
ready to forfeit their right to, and certainty of, a com- 
fortable genteel provision for life, unless for a similar 
competency to live on in the married state. To the 
widower in military or civil service going abroad, 
how much superior such a home for his daughters 
would be to a boarding-school, of whose mistress and 
inmates he knows and can know nothing, or to the 



WOULD BE USEFUL AND PRACTICABLE. 501 

precarious living with an aunt, or maiden sister-in- 
law, or married she-friend, whose temper perhaps 
stands at very hot, and heart at very cold, in the pri- 
vate thermometer of daily life at the fireside. Will 
no projector for the good of society, and with an eye 
to a job for himself, seize the pen and draw up a cap- 
tivating prospectus of such a Church of England 
convent for ladies — a village, all their own, situated 
in the midst of their own domain — old trees, old 
grass, a wood, a stream, green slopes, tangled lanes, 
and all the beauties of English scenery, villas clus- 
tered together, each with its garden, its flower-plot, 
its verandah, its little greenhouse, and all such lady- 
like comforts and accompaniments, the inmates en- 
joying their books, their walks, their music, their 
drawing, their visits at home to each other, their sum- 
mer excursions abroad, to Switzerland and Italy, free 
from the care and uncertainty of a precarious income, 
and by the economy of united means supplied at the 
cheapest rate with all they consume by their own 
tradesmen, and living with an elegance and ease that 
wealth and pomp cannot command ? What delightful 
parties ! What charming forenoon walks, and calls, 
and visits, and tea-clrinkings so interesting, and so blue! 
How pleasant to listen to the plans and anticipations 
of those going away, for a few weeks, on a tour of 
pleasure ! How pleasant to hear the tale of those 
just returned to their convent-home from jaunt or 
visit, who have found nothing so delightful as their 
home ! And all around them is their own in this 
home. No inhabitant on the domain, no tenant, 
tradesman, or labourer, but in connection with their 
establishment, and good people all and sure! Could 
not some modification of the co-operative principle 

B B .'* 



502 PEETZ. PLOEN — SCENERY. 

realise something of such a daydream ? Thousands 
of females bred, and from the social position, not 
merely from the idle vanity of their parents, unavoid- 
ably bred, in habits of refinement and elegance are, 
owing to the same social position, unavoidably thrown, 
on the death of their fathers', into such poverty that 
all their habits and tastes are out of place, only add 
to their distress, and make them feel how much hap- 
pier they would have been if it had been possible to 
bring them up to work for their daily bread in the 
fields or in the factory, with only the tastes and 
habits suitable to that condition ! Could not this class 
be saved from much misery by some union, not quite 
so Utopian as fancy may sketch out from such an es- 
tablishment as this at Pretz, but by some practicable 
reasonable adaptation of the same principle to the 
realities of life ? The principle seems the same as 
that on which friendly societies, building societies, 
life assurance companies, and all such institutions are 
founded ; viz. the union of small yearly payments, 
and of the falling in of accumulated sums to the ge- 
neral fund, by deaths, marriages, or other provision, 
and the providing out of this union or general fund 
a more full income or living than the remaining 
members could have enjoyed as isolated persons, if 
their annual contributions had been saved and accu- 
mulated by themselves. It is a matter of calculation. 
Beyond Pretz the traveller, following the same road 
from Kiel, comes to Ploen, a small town standing on 
a neck of land, which seems to divide a considerable 
lake into two. The old castle stands on a considerable 
elevation ; and the scenery of wooded islands and head- 
lands running out into the lake, is very beautiful in 
itself and more prized from being unexpected. The 



EUTIN ITS STANDING ARMY. 503 

flat unpicturesque country, which extends from the 
shores of the Baltic to the Rhine, or Xeckar, and from 
the Xorth Sea coast into Asia, -presents very few 
tracts of fine natural scenery. The environs of Ploen, 
and its lakes, and castle, and wooded islets, and points 
of lands are perhaps the most beautiful and pictu- 
resque in the Xorth of Germany. Ploen was once a 
little principality, independent of Holstein, which ac- 
counts for its Schloss or castle. The last duke died 
about eighty years ago, and the duchy of Holstein- 
Ploen fell into the Danish royal family, as next heirs. 
It is now a poor dead place. Onwards a few miles, 
on the same lake, is a similar little town, Eutin, of 
about 4000 inhabitants, the capital of another little 
principality, that of the prince bishop of Lubeck, a 
branch of the Oldenburgh family, and thus connected 
with the imperial family of Russia. This little prin- 
cipality, of about 5000 subjects, escaped many of the 
calamities of the last war by the connection of its 
prince with the imperial family of Russia. In former 
days, about the beginning of this century, when my 
acquaintance with this part of Germany commenced, 
this little principality was wisely governed by its 
prince bishop, according to the old German style and 
system, although even then the forms appeared to 
young travellers somewhat old-fashioned and ludi- 
crous. The standing army consisted of a corporal's 
guard in red uniform, with a cross of varnished tin, 
to denote the Church militant, upon the one cartouche- 
box which, with corresponding belt, bayonet, and 
musket, formed the materiel of war, belonging to the 
state arsenal, and was handed over by the one sentry 
to the other, when they were relieved on guard, the 
one helping the other, in the most neighbourly way, 

K K 4 



504 , EUTIN THE NORTHERN WEIMAR. 

to put on the warlike accoutrements. The duty was 
to defend the wire front of an aviary from the town 
cats, and this portion of the Germanic empire from 
the attacks of the republican French. The civil es- 
tablishment was not less imposing than the military 
in this miniature state. At a miserable table d'hote, 
at one o'clock, I remember dining with a gentleman 
in court-dress, powdered hair, yellow T ish-white silk 
stockings, purple silk smallclothes, rapier, and coat of 
a pompadour colour, with a gold-embroidered key 
upon the pocket-flap — a live chamberlain, or Kammer- 
lierr, of the reigning sovereign. I and my comrade, 
a student of Kiel, laughed until we rolled upon the 
grass at our own wit in ridiculing the state establish- 
ment of this empire of Eutin. Yet it is easier for 
young travellers to ridicule and laugh at such esta- 
blishments of old standing, than to examine and un- 
derstand the good that may be in them. This little 
state and its prince were among the most estimable 
things in the North of Europe at that period. The 
establishments were of the smallest, because the 
system and organisation of the Germanic empire re- 
garded such little principalities as independent states, 
and entailed on them the necessity of keeping up, 
nominally, a court and a civil and military establish- 
ment. The ridiculous was in the system, not in the 
personages necessarily carrying it on. This prince was 
in reality one of the most estimable of that period, the 
friend of the Stolbergs, ofVoss, Jacobi, of Tischbein 
the painter, of Schlosser, Bredow, and other men of 
of intellectual eminence, who made Eutin, in the 
North, something, in a smaller way, like Weimar in 
the South of Germany. Of the eminent men who 



TISCHBEIN. VOSS.— -GOTHE. 505 

retired to Eutin at the outbreak of the revolutionary 
storm, Tischbein will probably be named by posterity, 
when the others and their works are consigned to 
oblivion. He removed from Naples at the beginning 
of the war in Italy, and for a time settled at Eutin. 
His paintings are more highly prized at Rome and 
Naples than those of any other artist, foreign or 
native, of his times, and they are not merely esteemed, 
but, in the judgment of many, have not yet reached 
the degree of estimation in which they will be held 
by posterity. Great power in painting, although 
painting is partly a mechanical art, seems much more 
rare than great power in poetry. Germany has pro- 
duced dozens of good poets, for one good painter. 
Voss lived many years at Eutin ; and the locality of 
his poem, " Louise," is at this lake and in its neigh- 
bourhood. His "Louise" is an attempt to introduce 
hexameter verse into the German language, and apply 
it to a subject of ordinary domestic life. It came, 
therefore, into comparison and competition with the 
" Hermann and Dorothea" of Goth e ; a poem of the 
same class of subject and versification, and composed 
with the same view. A party spirit in literature ex- 
ists in Germany as strongly as in politics in our 
country. Having no political existence or business 
in real life, the German throws himself with a keener 
party-spirit into the strife of literature, than we can 
enter into, or sympathise with; and admits no excel- 
lence but in the puppet of his party — the Pitt or 
Fox of his literary predilection. This party-spirit 
had, in Gothe's lifetime, so extensively Gothecised the 
public mind, that no merit of any kind or degree in 
literature was admitted, which was independent of, or 



506 LOUISE HERMANN AND DOROTHEA. 

seemed opposed to the taste, opinion, example, and 
merit of Gothe. This delusion is passing away, and 
Gothe is settling down into a much lower seat than 
his admirers assigned to him, even a few years ago. 
The unprejudiced reader, who compares the " Louise" 
and the " Hermann and Dorothea," finds the ideas of 
Yoss more natural and poetic, the manners and images 
he presents to the mind more agreeable and pleasing, 
and his sweet picture of still life — of the still life of 
the village pastor, and the marriage of the village 
pastor's daughter, and of the quietude, comfort, and 
good feeling of the old minister and his family — more 
true to nature, and to a nature delightful to the 
fancy, than Gothe's hurly-burly of a village on fire, 
and the inn-keeper's son of the next village harnessing 
his horses, and driving his stool-waggon, in Homeric 
verse and style, to the rescue of his future love and 
spouse. Gothe's poem may be a better imitation of 
Homer in versification and spirit ; but the style and 
manner of Ajax, or Hector, engaged in a great event 
in a great epic, appear a little out of place, a little 
burlesque in sound and sense, in the matter of the 
village hero, the innkeeper's son, hastening in his war- 
chariot, viz. the stool- waggon and four grey plough- 
horses, to a fire in the next village. It is too serious 
to be burlesque, and too burlesque to be serious. The 
poem of Yoss, its competitor in the adaptation of 
the classical versification to German poetry, pleases 
the many, because it is an original, not an imitative 
poem, and although not a great and powerful work 
of genius, it addresses itself to German habits, tastes, 
and feelings. The " Hermann and Dorothea" addresses 
itself to a conventional and acquired taste and feeling 



VOSS. GOTHE. 507 

for the classical model, and pleases only the school of 
imaginative literature which has been formed on that 
model. In literature, as in morals, the many occupy 
the jury-box, and their verdict is generally sustained 
in the high court of time. It would be ridiculous to 
place Voss beside Gothe as an equally great poet ; 
yet, in this one instance, Voss has hit, and Gothe 
has missed, what pleases the taste of the many. 



508 ANGELN. — THE ANGLO-SAXONS. 



CHAP. XIX. 

NOTES ON ANGELN. THE ANGLO-SAXONS — WHO WERE THE 

ANGLO-SAXONS? CLAIM OF THE PRESENT GERMANS TO BE 

CONSIDERED ANGLO-SAXONS DIFFERENCE IN THE PHYSICAL 

CIRCUMSTANCES AND CHARACTER OF THE TWO POPULATIONS. 

THE CEMENT WHICH BINDS PEOPLE TOGETHER INTO A NATION 

WANTING IN GERMANY GERMAN NATIONALITY NOT POSSIBLE — 

CONFLICTING INTERESTS OF THE DIFFERENT PARTS OF GER- 
MANY PREVENT A BENEFICIAL UNITY OR NATIONALITY FE- 
DERAL UNION ONLY ATTAINABLE. — SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE 

CONTINENTAL PEOPLE MATERIAL CONDITION INTELLECTUAL 

CONDITION — INCAPACITY FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT OR LIBERAL 
CONSTITUTIONS. 

No spot of land on the face of the earth can claim 
such historical importance — excepting only the Holy 
Land, and the seven hills beside the Tiber — as a slip 
of country, in extent scarcely exceeding a large pa- 
rish, situate between the North Sea and the Baltic, 
the river Eyder and a muddy inlet of the Baltic 
called the Schley. This is Angeln, the native land of 
the Anglo-Saxon people, the soil on which the ele- 
ments of liberty and constitutional government, of the 
free institutions, laws, character, and spirit which 
distinguish at the present day the descendants of the 
Anglo-Saxons, were originally sown; and which, trans- 
planted into England, are now, after a growth of 
fourteen centuries, overspreading the world, and dif- 
fusing civilisation and freedom through the human 
race. Germany, with her 40,000,000 of people, knows 
no higher glory in this 19th century, than to claim 
kindred and identity of race, language, social insti- 



ANGELN. THE ANGLO-SAXONS. 509 

tutions, and character, in remote times, with the in- 
habitants of this little spot of land, and to claim for 
them the honour of having been the primary root and 
stock of the character, spirit, energy, love of inde- 
pendence, and sense of individual rights, which their 
descendants in England and America have developed 
into constitutional governments, uniting liberty and 
the civil and political rights of individuals with the 
highest national power and glory. But is all this 
true ? Were the Anglo-Saxons of the 5th century 
the ancestors of the present German populations, and 
the progenitors, in any reasonable sense of the word, 
of the English nation ? Were the Anglo-Saxons of the 
5th century the type of the ancient German popu- 
lation of that age; the same people, not merely in the 
colour of the hair, eyes, and skin, or in the tempera- 
ment of which these are indications, but the same in 
thesocial position and circumstances which form the 
institutions and character of nations ? Were the 
Anglo-Saxons of the 5th century really the chosen 
people, the Israel of civilisation and liberty on earth ? 
Or is all this the self-delusion of mod era vanity 
seeking to connect itself with a character, spirit, 
and social arrangement not known, within historical 
times at least, to have existed among any portion of 
the German population ; a kind of self-adulation of 
the visionaries called the Young Germany, who find- 
ing nothing in the past or present history of the 
German people connecting them with free social in- 
stitutions, fall back upon a condition described by 
Tacitus 400 years before the Anglo-Saxons are 
named in history, and claim it as their own ? Who 
were the Anglo-Saxons ? One who listens to the 
declamations of German students and professors on 



510 WHO WERE THE ANGLO-SAXONS 

the glory, past, present, and to come, of the Anglo- 
Saxon race, the ancestors of the fair-haired blue- 
eyed Burschenschaft of Germania, the elite of the sons 
of men, would suppose that in ancient times a 
mighty nation called Anglo-Saxons had occupied the 
country from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the 
Adriatic to the Baltic, and had sent an expedition in 
the 5th century to England, to exterminate the in- 
habitants, and plant there the institutions, laws, 
manners, spirit, and language of this great people. 
The Anglo-Saxons, however, appear to have been in 
the 5th century the inhabitants of a very small tract 
of country, who, from the physical circumstances in 
which they existed, never could have had common in- 
stitutions, laws, manners, and character, with the in- 
land inhabitants of the rest of Germany. They first 
appeared on the English coast, according to Bede and 
the Saxon Chronicle, in the year 449, almost 40 years 
after the Eomans had abandoned the island ; and in 
the course of 100 years of incessant warfare with the 
natives and with each other, they established seven, 
or rather eight, little kingdoms in England. Bede 
died in 734, nearly 300 years after this invasion, and 
he is the nearest historian to the events he records, 
the authorities he refers to being his contemporaries, 
who furnished him with facts or traditions, and the 
Saxon Chronicle being a later production compiled 
from his work. Two centuries and a half, or nearly 
three centuries, intervene between the facts and the 
nearest record of them, and of that period a consi- 
derable portion was passed by the Anglo-Saxons in 
ignorance of Christianity and the use of letters, and 
the other part in the fanaticism of new converts to 
Christianity, still more fatal than ignorance to the 



OF THE FIFTH CENTURY? 511 

transmission of past events, because it rejected, as 
connected with paganism, the traditions of their fore- 
fathers. There is much in the ordinary historical 
account of the Saxon invasion, taken from Bede and 
the Saxon Chronicle, that suggests suspicion. Hengist 
and Horsa, we are told, landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle 
of Thanet, near the mouth of the Wantsum, now an 
inconsiderable brook, or rather ditch, which divided 
the isle from the main coast. Julius Caesar landed in 
the same locality, and secured his vessels within a 
walled inclosure still in part remaining. It is intel- 
ligible that his fleet, coming from the opposite coast 
near Boulogne, should make for this port or beach ; 
but why vessels coming from Angeln at the mouth of 
the Eyder, should cross the mouths of the Elbe, 
Weser, and Rhine, on their side of the North Sea, or 
of the Thames on the British coast if they took our 
side, and should run round the North Foreland and 
Isle of Thanet, up to the same port or beach used by 
Caesar, in order to land there, is not so obvious. The 
coincidence looks as if the two traditions, that of the 
Roman and that of the Saxon invasion, had been 
blended into one story. The invaders of the year 
449, we are told, consisted of three tribes, Juti, Angli, 
and Old Saxons. These must have been distinct in 
language, manners, and laws, to be distinctly enu- 
merated ; and the different settlements or kingdoms 
of each in their new country kept separate in history 
as long as the heptarchy lasted, and down to the 
time of Bede. Now, the Juti have always had a well- 
defined boundary in their native country, having the 
sea on all sides of them but one. The Angli, avc are 
told, were between the Juti and the Old Saxons. The 
present Angeln is so situated, if the Old Saxons were 



512 WHO WERE THE ANGLO-SAXONS? 

the forefathers of the present Frisians of Eydersted, 
Ditmarsh, and the west side of Holstein ; but it is a 
little district about 22 miles in extent from north to 
south, or from Hottinsted to Rendsburg, and about 
the same from east to west, or from the shore of the 
Baltic to the shore of the North Sea. This district of 
Angeln, whether it was greater or smaller in the 5th 
century than now, was deserted, we are told by Bede, 
even to his time, owing to the removal of its inha- 
bitants to England. This is also a suspicious account. 
The land of Angeln is equal to any in England, or in 
the neighbouring and surrounding country of Hol- 
stein, in capability of yielding subsistence to man. It 
is contrary to all probability that it should have re- 
mained uninhabited for 250 years, while the country 
on each side of it was occupied, although in general 
of inferior soil. Angeln may in the 5th century 
have included all Schleswig ; but in whatever way the 
country may have been divided among the three 
tribes, it is certain that the invaders came altogether 
from the country north of the Elbe, and the Trave, 
which runs into the Gulf of Lubeck. Now, the whole 
population at the present day of this peninsula, from 
its extremity, the Scaw Point, up to the Elbe and 
Trave, including the cities of Hamburgh, Lubeck, 
Altona, Flensburg, Kiel, Gluckstadt, and many im- 
portant towns with some manufactures and foreign 
trade, does not exceed twelve or fourteen hundred 
thousand souls. It cannot reasonably be assumed 
that this peninsula was more densely inhabited when 
the people were in a more rude and barbarous con- 
dition, and depended on hunting and fishing for a 
subsistence, or on a husbandry and trade much more 
imperfect than at present. The grown up males of 



WHO WERE THE ANGLO-SAXONS? 513 

such a population as may have existed in the 5th 
century in this country, might be sufficiently nu- 
merous to conquer and subdue the people of England, 
and to seize their lands, as the Romans had done 
about five centuries before, and as the Danes and 
Normans did to this Saxon population iive centuries 
later ; but that they should have extirpated the race 
of the original inhabitants in any of their petty king- 
doms, and have become in any literal sense the pro- 
genitors of the present English people, is not credible, 
because not consistent with their own obvious in- 
terests, nor with the analogy of a prior and a subse- 
quent conquest of the country in similar circumstances. 
They came as conquerors not as colonists. People 
were a property as much as land or movables, and by 
far too valuable to be exterminated either by the 
Romans, the Saxons, the Danes, or the Normans. 
We have no reason to doubt that the Saxon con- 
querors, like the Romans before, and the Normans 
after, became insensibly amalgamated with, and ab- 
sorbed in, the more numerous prior population ; and 
we know from Caesar, that the Belgae, a people of 
cognate race and tongue with the Saxon invaders, 
were settled before his time in all the coasts of Britain 
opposite their own country ; and Procopius mentions 
the Frisii as a people settled in Britain before the 
period of the invasion of the Juti, Frisi, and Saxones 
of Bede. It is to be observed also that neither Bede 
nor the Saxon Chronicle mention that the invaders 
brought their wives and children, cattle, and house- 
hold goods, with them ; and the small number of 
vessels in each expedition recorded, and the perpe- 
tual warfare during the first hundred years with the 
natives, or with each other, preclude the idea that 

L L 



514 AFFINITY OF MODERN GERMANS WITH 

they came as colonists or settlers exterminating and 
replacing the old race of people, and not mixing and 
becoming identified with them. 

It is by some process of imagination rather than 
one of sober reason, that the present Germans, the 
Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, Hessians, connect them- 
selves in theory with the mixed people of England, 
and claim a kind of hereditary part, an affinity of 
spirit, character, and mind, in the laws and insti- 
tutions, which time and circumstances have produced 
among the descendants of the Frisi, Angli, Juti, Celts, 
Belgse, Romans, Danes, all mixed together in the race 
of the present English and American populations. 
History, from the days of Charlemagne to the present 
hour, shows no such affinity of character, spirit, or 
national action, and feeling for free institutions, 
between the people of Germany and the people of 
England. It would puzzle the homceopathist to ex- 
press the proportion of German blood that may be 
running in the veins of John Bull or his American 
children ; and it would puzzle the philosophic his- 
torian to discover any similarity at any period in their 
character, spirit, or idiosyncrasy as nations. German 
philosophers, indeed, discover an identity of race 
between the modern English and the Teutonic people, 
in the fair hair, blue eyes, white skin, and affinity of 
language. But a common language, common descent, 
and all the physical circumstances of similarity of eyes, 
hair, and skin, do not give nations any more than in- 
dividuals a similarity of mind, character, feeling for 
independence, for liberty, for free action, and all that 
makes the difference between the spirit, social ex- 
istence, and national idiosyncrasy of a free and a 
servile people. In these, the fair-haired, blue-eyed 



THE DESCENDANTS OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS. 515 

German is as different from the fair-haired, blue-eyed 
Englishman — physical characteristics of race, by 
the by, which are very rarely seen in England — as 
the dark-complexioned Hindoo from the dark-com- 
plexioned Spaniard. It is in the unseen, not in the 
seen, — in the mind and character, not in the hair, or 
eyes, or skin, that the intellectual and moral diffe- 
rences between nation and nation are to be sought ; 
and these differences arise, not from difference of race 
but from difference of the physical and social circum- 
stances in which each nation exists. In all ages a 
radical difference, social and intellectual, must have 
existed between the three tribes blended together 
under the name of Anglo-Saxons, and the main body 
of the Germanic people who now claim an original 
identity with them. The people who invaded and 
conquered England in the 5th century, must have 
been a sea-faring people, a people conversant with, and 
whose institutions and national idiosyncrasy were 
formed upon, the habitual living with an element in 
their social existence, unknown to the inland Germans 
of the forest. This difference, alone, is sufficient to 
form a difference in the character and spirit, and in 
all that distinguishes nation from nation. The sea- 
faring man, depending every hour upon his own skill 
and exertion, is bred individually in a school of 
energy, perseverance, self-reliance, and independence 
of mind and action. This character, formed by 
physical circumstances common to a large proportion 
of a population, spreads over a whole nation, and gives 
its tone and spirit to all their institutions, in every 
stage of their civilisation. They have an additional 
element to live with. A boat in a gale of wind is a 
practical illustration of the ideal republic of the inla- 
id l 2 



516 GERMANS AND ANGLO-SAXONS 

ginative political philosopher. The most skilful, in 
whose experience the crew have confidence, takes the 
helm, — every man takes his place and duty according 
to his fitness. Birth, title, privilege, conventional 
rank or distinction fall away here. All obey the most 
suitable commander, all feel their responsibility and 
their own individual worth, in their common struggle 
against the element. A sea-faring people are neces- 
sarily co-operative, necessarily under discipline, yet 
individually independent. No such character and 
social habits are formed, or rather forced upon a land- 
ward population either of hunters, husbandmen, or 
shepherds, by any circumstances in their modes of 
living. They are isolated from each other rather 
than independent. They are rarely brought into 
co-operative exertion for a common good, but only for 
the benefit of a superior and master. They are con- 
sequently less prepared, individually, for civil and 
political liberty in their institutions ; are less co- 
operative, yet less self-acting, less reflective, less fore- 
seeing. It is chiefly in the inland countries of Europe 
that despotic governments have been established. In 
countries with a side to the sea, — as Spain, France, the 
Netherlands, Denmark, Holland, — the character of the 
population has always enforced on the governments a 
respect for their civil rights, as great as under con- 
stitutional governments. A sea-faring population is 
also necessarily a sea-side population ; and the land on 
the sea-coast, from the most westerly point of Jutland 
to Ostend, has been, as stated in a previous note, 
gradually gained from the sea by the labour of resi- 
dent peasant-proprietors, and can only be defended 
from the sea by their intelligence and co-operative 
labour in repairing their sea-dykes. Self-government 



FORMED UNDER DIFFERENT INFLUENCES. 517 

in each little community is necessary for the very 
existence of the land. Aristocracy and functionarism 
cannot intrude here. In the country between the 
Eyder and the Elbe, there are no noble estates, not a 
functionary, except the amtman, who is not appointed 
by the people themselves, the peasant-proprietors. 
Self-government is more fully in action here, in the 
original seat of the Anglo-Saxons under the auto- 
cratic Danish rule at the present day, than in any 
part of the Continent. The circumstances, in short, 
under which a people live, form the mind, character, 
and institutions of that people ; and not the colour of 
their hair and eyes, or the identity of their race and 
language with any other people. The coast- side 
population of Germany must in all ages have been a 
different people from the inland population, in cha- 
racter, institutions, and national idiosyncrasy. They 
appear to have been so in the earliest times, even in 
religion. Odin, and the Anglo-Saxon and Scan- 
dinavian mythology of Odinism, do not appear to 
have belonged to the inland German people, but to 
the sea-coast tribes. 

Five of the greatest monarchs who ever ruled in 
Europe were nearly contemporaries, about the be- 
ginning of the 9th century, — Charlemagne, Alfred 
the Great of England, Harold Haarfagre of Norway, 
Eric of Sweden, and Gorm the Old of Denmark; 
and they appear to have had one common object in 
their policy — to nationalise their countries, to put 
down the petty independent nobles, or small kings, 
within their territories, and to extend one govern- 
ment, law, and kingly power over the whole. It 
is remarkable that the most powerful of these so- 
vereigns, Charlemagne, was the least successful in 

L L 3 



518 GERMANY IN ALL AGES DIVIDED 

the ultimate results of the attempt. Norway, England, 
Denmark, Sweden, became and remained consolidated 
nations. The empire of Charlemagne fell asunder 
when the hand was cold that had squeezed it into one 
body. It is easy for the historian to account for this 
by the weakness or perversity of Charlemagne's suc- 
cessors ; but to split and divide seems to be in the 
nature of the German people, or rather of the social 
circumstances under which they live, and to have 
been so from the earliest times to the present day. 
Tacitus gives us the names of about twenty-seven 
tribes of Germans living between the Elbe, the Saal, 
and the Vistula ; and of about eighteen between the 
Elbe and the Rhine. What can be the reason that 
for eighteen centuries, from the days of Tacitus to the 
present time, Germany has remained in the same 
social state as to the union or nationality of its inha- 
bitants ? It has ever been what Tacitus describes it, 
— a country inhabited by from thirty-eight to fifty 
distinct tribes of one race and language, and capable 
of uniting for any great effort of importance to all, 
but falling asunder into distinct states or tribes as 
soon as the pressure of the occasion is over, having no 
nationality, common feeling, or principle of union as 
a nation, in their ordinary social existence. The last 
great effort of the whole German people united for a 
common object was in 1813, when they rose as one 
mighty nation, and drove the French armies over the 
Rhine. It was the counterpart of the great united 
effort of their ancestors in the first century against the 
Roman legions. It had the same success in expelling 
the common enemy from the German soil, and it was 
followed by the same result, — the return of each little 
semi-independent tribe, or state, to its own separate so- 
cial existence, with a slight bond of union for the whole, 



INTO SEPARATE TRIBES OR STATES. 519 

in a federative assembly of deputies from the different 
chiefs of the thirty-eight modern German tribes. This 
was the constitution or social arrangement of Ger- 
many in the time of Tacitus, and is the arrangement 
adopted by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Some 
reason there must be more than mere chance, or mere 
conventional or political causes, which are but tempo- 
rary in social affairs, for this endurance through eigh- 
teen hundred years, and through every condition of so- 
ciety, from the most barbarous to the most civilised, of 
a tendency to a disjointed social state among the Ger- 
man people. France, Spain, England, during the 
middle ages, were always tending towards nationality, 
towards common interests, common feelings, a common 
government, the suppression of the smaller territorial 
or social divisions of the country and people, and 
towards their consolidation into one nation. Ger- 
many stands in nationality in the 19th century 
where it stood in the first, — a country divided into 
thirty or forty small nationalities or governments. 
There must be some reason, founded on natural cir- 
cumstances, for this continuity of its social condition. 
The great movement of Germany in 1848, which is 
still going on, is to establish a nationality of all the 
people of German race and language. The idea has 
been in agitation among the youth and the learned of 
the universities since the glorious issue of the war of 
liberation, in 1813. It has been widely diffused 
and generally accepted among all Germans of the 
middle and upper classes. The misgovernment, op- 
pression, excessive taxation, and sacrifice of personal 
freedom and industry to the useless Landwehr and 
functionary establishments, have made the prospect 
of any change from their present condition popular 

L L 4 



520 IDENTITY OF RACE AND LANGUAGE 

among all classes. But the two great principles laid 
down by the educated upper classes — that identity of 
race and identity of language constitute the basis of 
nationality — are false and imaginary. Germany itself 
is a standing proof of the insufficiency of these two 
principles to form one nation of the German people. 
England and the United States of America prove that 
identity of race, language, literature, religion, laws, 
and manners are altogether insufficient, even to hold 
together as one nation two populations with no com- 
mon interests. The Germans have a proof nearer home 
of the insufficiency of the principles they have laid 
down as a basis of German unity. The people of Alsace 
are of German descent, and use the German tongue ; 
yet in the campaign of the allied German powers 
against France, in 1813-14, they met nowhere in France 
so obstinate a resistance from guerilla bands, formed vo- 
luntarily by the people, as precisely in Alsace. This was 
so obvious, that Professor Arndt, one of the earliest 
and most enthusiastic promoters of a new German na- 
tionality to be founded on the original identity of race 
and language, published a treatise at the time, upon 
the bad reception of, and practical resistance to, the 
German troops, by their brethren of the same race 
and language, the Alsatians, and is unable to account 
for this anomaly to his theory. The true reason is, 
that his theory, which has been adopted by the young 
Germany, and by the constituent assembly at Frankfort 
in their speculations, has no foundation in reality — is 
merely one of those imaginations which the German 
mind receives in spite of facts, and historical evidence, 
and cherishes for a time with the wildest enthusiasm. 
The social cement which binds populations together 
into one nation is their mutual material interests. 



NOT SUFFICIENT FOE NATIONAL UNITY. 521 

Identity of race and language will not nationalise a 
population. In Germany this cement is wanting. 
The inhabitants of the different parts of the country 
do not require each other in their ordinary existence, 
do not employ each other, have no mutual material 
interests binding them together into one whole. What 
common interest, for instance, have the people of 
Bavaria, on the Danube, or on the shores of the Lake 
of Constance, with the people on the Vistula, or on 
the shores of the Baltic ? They have nothing to ex- 
change with each other. Each district produces the 
same articles — rye, wheat, wool, flax, timber — and 
in sufficient abundance for the inhabitants, and the 
distance, as well as the identity of products, prevents 
interchange, commercial relations, or common in- 
terests. Would the inhabitants of Bavaria, upon the 
imaginary connexion of being one nation with the 
inhabitants of Pomerania, because they have the same 
colour of hair, eyes, and skin, and speak the same or 
a similar language, consent to pay heavy taxes in 
order to build ships of war, or naval arsenals, and 
forts, for the defence of the Pomeranian coast ? Would 
it be a just and natural social arrangement ? The two 
districts or populations are as distinct as if the ocean 
rolled between them. The productions, natural or 
artificial, of France — the wines, silks, and manufactures 
of the south, the grain, woollens, linens, and cottons 
of the north, and the great centre of money, of legis- 
lation, and of political movement in Paris — bind to- 
gether all the departments of France into one nation. 
The same community of interests, the same mutual 
dependence upon each other of all the parts, the same 
or even a greater impossibility of living without each 
other, connect all the parts and individuals in the 



522 MUTUAL MATERIAL INTERESTS THE 

British dominions into one whole, with common feel- 
ing, as a nation. In Germany Nature has denied, by 
her very bounty to each district or group of inhabit- 
ants, the means of connecting them into one nation. 
They have naturally no want of each other, are not 
obliged to exchange industry for industry with each 
other, have no products peculiar to one part of the 
country, and not to be obtained in another but by 
interchange — such, for instance, as wine in France, or 
coals in England — and without such mutual demand 
and supply, and such common interests uniting them, 
a people cannot be a nation. They may be centralised 
under one government, but not nationalised. The 
German philosophers refer to the United States of 
America as a country of much greater extent than 
Germany, and yet completely nationalised and imbued 
with a common spirit and national feeling from end 
to end of their vast territories. But the United States 
are amalgamated into one nation by the same prin- 
ciple — their mutual material interests — as all other 
nations, and not by the identity of race and language. 
The Northern States, with their capital, commerce, 
shipping, and rising manufactures, supply the Southern 
States with what they cannot produce for themselves, 
and take their finer products of cotton, tobacco, rice, 
in exchange. Carolina and Louisiana are more closely 
and directly connected with New England or New 
York than any two contiguous provinces in Germany 
— than Holstein and Hanover, for instance, or Meck- 
lenburg and Brunswig. The politicians who predict 
that some day the United States will fall asunder into 
separate kingdoms or republics, have not considered 
how closely they are united by their material interests , 
It is not more probable than that England should 



TRUE BASIS OF NATIONAL UNION. 523 

some day resolve itself into the Saxon Heptarchy. It 
is federalism, not nationality, that the German people 
may with advantage establish. Nationality, national 
power, and one executive and legislative central con- 
stitutional government for all of German race and 
tongue, amalgamating forty millions of people between 
the Vistula, the Rhine, the Baltic, and the Adriatic, 
into one nation, with a common spirit, common go- 
vernment, common laws, rights, and a common repre- 
sentative legislature, is a brilliant fancy, and a nucleus 
of truth is not wanting in the vision. It cannot be 
denied that the forty millions of German people par- 
celled out by the Vienna Congress among thirty-eight 
different sovereigns, great and small, are misgoverned, 
oppressed, deprived of their natural freedom and civil 
rights, have no voice in the management of their own 
affairs, no organ of their public opinion, and in their 
social and political condition stand far behind the re- 
quirements of an educated highly civilised people in 
our age. But how much of the speculation which 
throws a splendid halo round this nucleus of truth will 
bear sober examination ? An executive and legislative 
authority over all Germany, as in France or England, 
would in every act be inflicting monstrous injustice 
on one portion or another of such a disjointed popu- 
lation having no real common interests, and from 
natural circumstances incapable of having common 
interests and a common spirit of nationality, unless in 
the extraordinary circumstances of a general invasion. 
It was not even the invasion of Germany by the French 
previous to the Peace of Tilsit that raised any national 
spirit, but the subsequent oppressions of the invaders. 
A league of independent states to repel any future 
invasion, and a constitutional government in each 



524 GERMAN NATIONALITY INVOLVES 

state, is probably all that can be attained, or that it 
would be desirable for the German people to attain. 
A central power, with armies, fleets, a diplomacy, and 
a court establishment of its own, would exceed the 
financial resources of Germanv. Each state has at 
present its own public debt, its own military and civil 
establishments, and, except the diplomacy, which is 
but a trifling expense in the smaller states, no saving 
whatsoever could be effected on the present expendi- 
ture of each state. But, to meet that expenditure, 
the people are already taxed to the very utmost in 
every part of Germany. The revenues are pledged 
for the public debt, and the taxes barely suffice to 
pay the interest to the creditors, and to meet the 
most needful expense of the several states. How 
then is a new central state-power of this great united 
German empire to be supported ? The Frankfort 
Assembly, in its visions of glory, proposed that the 
united central power of the new German empire 
should always have on foot an army of 480,000 men. 
But the present military establishments of the thirty- 
eight German states amount to about that number; 
and although only embodied and in pay for six weeks 
in the year, the Landwehr force has reduced almost 
every German state to a very dangerous position, by 
ruining the people, abstracting their time and labour 
from productive industry, and rendering them in- 
capable of paying any increase of taxation. Half a 
million of soldiers more than the present military 
force of Germany could not be supported. If the 
Frankfort Assembly meant only that the present half 
a million of Landwehr troops should be at the disposal 
of the central power at Frankfort, still it would be a 
most oppressive and expensive arrangement. The 



GREAT OPPRESSION OF THE PEOPLE. 525 

young men whose homes and means of living were 
on the Ehine or the Baltic might be called to serve 
for six weeks in regiments on the Danube or the 
Adriatic. If the Landwehr troops are to be, as now, 
the main military force of Germany, the burden of 
this military service on the people will be lighter, and 
the Landwehr cannot be better distributed for eco- 
nomy than by keeping the regiments as near as pos- 
sible to their native localities. But an army of half a 
million of men always under arms was but half the 
dream of this congress of dreamers. The new united 
German nation was to have a fleet in the North Sea, 
a fleet in the Baltic, and a fleet in the Adriatic. 
Holland, Belgium, and Denmark were to be incorpor- 
ated with the new German empire, as lands naturally 
belonging to it from their situation at the mouths of 
the great German rivers, or on the coasts of the great 
German Ocean, and inhabited by branches of the one 
blue-eyed fair-haired Teutonic race, using dialects of 
the common old Teutonic language. The King of 
Denmark was to be appointed Lord High Admiral of 
his own fleet by the central government at Frankfort; 
and the ships, colonies, and commerce of Holland, and 
manufactures of Belgium, were to be managed and 
directed in the departments of state of the centralised 
government of the new German empire situated at 
Erfurt or Frankfort. These idle visions melted away 
in the Spring of 1849, and the members of the Con- 
stituent Assembly at Frankfort returned each to his 
home, to sleep out on the domestic pillow, or in the 
arm chair, the glorious dreams of the young Germany, 
which the rude reality of want of power, funds, or 
principle, had disturbed on the benches of St. Paul's 
church at Frankfort. The whole German movement 



526 FEDERAL UNION MORE SUITABLE 

for a unity and central power impossible, or if pos- 
sible under the gripe of a strong despotism, either 
monarchical or republican in form, unjust and op- 
pressive for some portion or other of the united 
countries, and without any reciprocal advantages to 
the naturally distinct parts of this forced unity, will 
evaporate entirely, and leave no residuum. If it leave 
any, the movement will probably end in the very 
settlement of Germany which the Emperor Napoleon 
established — a federal union of the southern states, 
Bavaria, Saxony, Wurtemberg, Baden, and other 
smaller powers, and a similar federal union of the 
northern states, Prussia, Hanover, Brunswig, and 
others. There is a natural division in the tempera- 
ment, character, and manners of the Germans of the 
north and of the south of Germany, as well as in their 
material interests, and in the physical circumstances 
of climate, soil, and products, in which they live. It 
would be more easy and natural to make two nations 
of the people of Germany than one, notwithstanding 
the identity of race, language, eyes, hair, and skin. 

It is a striking fact connected with this subject that 
the Rhine Confederation of Napoleon required fewer 
men for military service as the contingent of each state, 
than the German Confederation of 1816, and was con- 
sequently less burdensome on the people. Bavaria 
had 30,000 men only to furnish as its contingent to 
the Rhine Confederation; but 55,000 men were its 
contingent to the German Confederation of 1816. 
Baden furnished 8000 men to the former, but 10,000 
to the latter. Hesse, 4000 to the one, but 6,200 to 
the other. Nassau, 1680 men to the Rhine Confede- 
ration, but 3082 to the German. In whatever way 
the contingents may have been divided among the 



THAN NATIONALITY TO GERMANY. 527 

States, in proportion to the accessions of territory 
they may have obtained at the settlement and partition 
of Germany, in 1815, it appears that, from the same 
population and country on the Rhine, an addition of 
about 30,000 men to the regular peace establishment 
was levied and supported under the order of things es- 
tablished by the Vienna Congress, more than under 
the Ehine Confederation, established by Napoleon . 
The excessive and unnecessary development of the 
military element through society, has been the bane 
of Germany since 1816, and its fruits are showing 
themselves in 1848. 

The traveller who desires to form a sound opinion 
on the social condition of the continental people must 
visit the continent repeatedly, and at various points. 
His first impressions will require revision, for they are 
generally magnified and embellished by novelty, or 
perhaps distorted by ignorance and prejudice. He 
seldom sees things as they are, at first sight. The 
conclusion to which a longer and more familiar ac- 
quaintance will lead him is, that the social and moral 
condition of the continental people is not keeping 
pace with their material and intellectual condition. 
They enjoy all the material means of science applied to 
the useful arts, of steam power applied to navigation, 
rail roads, and machinery, of chemical and mechanical 
knowledge applied to every process of productive in- 
dustry and manufacture, yet, owing apparently to the 
construction of society, these advantages want a basis 
to rest upon, and produce a progressive civilisation 
and well-being. They want a great and increasing 
home market, a great and increasing body of consumers 
able to pay for all that science and skill can produce 
for their gratification, and with means and demands 



528 DEFECTS IN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 

increasing as rapidly as production, and giving rise to 
it in all the arts of civilised life. The continental 
people enjoy a very great diffusion of property through 
the social body, by the division of land into small 
estates, and by the law of equal inheritance ; and 
in consequence of this general diffusion of property 
a very large proportion of the social body is exempt 
from absolute destitution of the necessaries of life ; 
but by this very diffusion of property the want of any 
thing more than the mere necessaries of life ; both the 
desires and tastes, and the means to pay for the higher 
gratifications of civilised life, which co-operative in- 
dustry, skill, capital, commerce, manufactories, and 
science are employed in producing, are limited and 
confined within very narrow bounds, and society is 
stationary, civilisation, material well-being, and repro- 
ductive employment, are not progressive, and with 
the increase of the numbers of the social body without 
any possible increase of the breadth of productive land, 
or of the employment that land can give, it is to be 
apprehended that this social condition may become 
retrograde. Many observers of the spirit of the age, 
who augured, from the general diffusion of landed 
property through the social body, a happy, enviable, 
and hitherto unknown state of society, and hailed the 
approach of the Saturnia Regna in the new social state 
into which Europe has entered, must confess their 
disappointment at its results. This new social state 
has happily got rid of the abuses of feudalism, and of 
the great feudal landholders ; but it has raised, and 
perhaps unavoidably raised, abuses, and a class still 
more oppressive, a class of functionaries not merely to 
do the necessary business of the state, but who have 
become a machinery holding the people and the state 



OF THE PEOPLE OF THE CONTINENT. 529 

itself in subjection to themselves. They are the state, 
and the German sovereigns are but their functionaries. 
Whatever be the form of government, autocratic or 
constitutional, they are the state power legislating 
through the cabinets, or through the pseudo-parlia- 
ments. They have in their hands the official inter- 
ference with and superintendence and oppression of 
the people without any class of social influence above 
or beside them for the mass to rally upon, and make 
effectual, by peaceful means, the voice of public opinion 
against gross misgovernment. In this social state all 
reform of abuses is reduced to a struggle of physical 
force between the governed and the governing. It 
has reduced the whole body of small proprietors to 
the condition of a soldiery on leave. What class is 
there in the social body to appeal to for their just 
rights as proprietors of the soil, — for their personal 
freedom from the thraldom of their military and civil 
functionaries ? None but functionaries and military 
officers interested in their thraldom. It has robbed 
property of its rights, industry of its motives, good 
conduct of its reward ; for property, industry, and 
good conduct in the civil relations of life are levelled 
in the ranks of the landwehr service, and in this semi- 
military structure of society, in which a functionary 
class has superintendence over every individual in the 
body of small landed proprietors, in every act or 
movement. These are unhappy results, which no 
human intelligence could have foreseen, or have made 
credible if foreseen, yet which, now that they are 
matter of experience and history, not of speculation, 
appear to be the natural and necessary consequences 
of a social state in which there is no class in the social 
body with the influence of superior property in land 

M M 



530 THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 

or other capital, standing between the rulers and the 
equalised mass of the community, the ruled. The 
habitude of subjection, the want of independent 
means and spirit, and of the practice of self-govern- 
ment in their own local and even personal interests 
and affairs, make such a population incapable of using 
free institutions, or liberal constitutions of govern- 
ment, if they had them. 

The continental people have enjoyed, in this ge- 
neration, an educational system which brings the 
whole population through government schools and 
seminaries adapted to every age, capacity, and station, 
taught by masters trained in normal schools to the 
science of teaching, examined, licensed, and appointed 
by the government and its educational functionaries. 
No unqualified and unlicensed person is allowed to 
open a school ; and no individual is allowed to neglect 
the duty of sending his children to school at a proper 
age. The results of this universal and compulsory 
educational system, from which so many good, well- 
meaning persons expected a speedy millennium of 
moral, intellectual, and social improvement and well- 
being, have not proved satisfactory. It has, no doubt, 
dispelled gross ignorance, and has diffused widely the 
pleasures of knowledge, and of cultivated tastes un- 
known to our labouring and middle classes, perhaps 
even to a large proportion of our wealthier class. But 
knowledge is not mental power. The mind is not 
formed in schools, but in free social action with affairs, 
interests, and temptations, which call forth the exercise 
of judgment, prudence, reflection, moral restraint, 
and right principle. The continental common man 
may know more of geography, history, and all the 
branches of education included in what is called use- 



HAS NOT RAISED THE CONTINENTAL PEOPLE. 531 

ful knowledge, than our ignorant man in the same 
station ; but his mental powers, his judgment, his 
good sense, his acuteness in his own business, his in- 
dustrial habits, his domestic habits, his sense of what 
is due to himself and others, his sense of right and 
wrong, his religious sense, are not so well educated. 
He is, owing to the social circumstances in which he 
lives, less capable of self-action, of independent opi- 
nion, of judging rightly in affairs public or private, 
than the much more ignorant man of the same station 
in England. His knowledge and taste, in all literary 
and especially imaginative productions, and in all that 
addresses itself to the ear and eye, may be much more 
cultivated; but this school-room training, although 
it adds to his intellectual enjoyments, and is, on this 
account, no doubt of the highest value, does not add 
to his energy, perseverance, intellectual powers of 
judging and acting rightly, nor to those qualifications 
which make the upright, respected man and useful 
citizen. For these acquirements he must go to a 
higher school than the Prussian gymnasia — the 
school of life in a free society, in which every man may 
manage his own interests according to his own judg- 
ment. This national education system is attended 
with another evil touched upon in former notes, 
which was not foreseen, and was not intended by the 
governments by which it was instituted and adopted. 
It throws the formation of the public mind and opi- 
nion entirely into the hands of a junta of professors 
bred in the same philosophy and views of social polity. 
All men, from the peasant boy to the prince, are 
trained in the same visionary schemes and theories. 
All who have minds to be moved by intellectual in- 
fluences are moved, not by their own minds, but by 

M M 2 



532 PUBLIC OPINION IN THE HANDS OF 

theories and views in which they have been indoctri- 
nated by their functionary teachers. These, from the 
teachers of the alphabet in the primary school up to 
the professor in the university, have all been trained 
in one set of opinions, — are disciples of the same doc- 
trine in philosophy and social economy. The sove- 
reign may change his ministers or his functionaries ; 
but he only changes the men not the measures of his 
government, for all are imbued with the same prin- 
ciples and spirit. In our social state, in which educa- 
tion is a free trade, and mind and opinion are free, 
the erroneous doctrines or views of one school of 
political or philosophical opinions are neutralised by 
those of another. Our free press and education, in 
the real affairs of life, sift and fling away all visionary 
theories in practical government, and form the public 
mind to judge truly, and in general correctly, on all 
public interests. The continental governments ex- 
pected, by seizing the reins of education, and appoint- 
ing all teachers, from the highest to the lowest, in the 
national schools and universities, to regulate the 
public mind and opinion in a way conducive to 
their own power and stability. But the teachers are 
the disciples of those who taught them, and they are 
a body of academical philosophers, imbued with po- 
litical doctrines and theories, which, by the machinery 
of licensed teachers, examined and qualified by them, 
are universally diffused, are inoculated into the youth 
in every stage of education, and form the public 
mind. These doctrines and opinions, however true 
as abstract propositions, are not practically applicable 
to the existing governments in Germany, by any 
reform short of revolution ; and national education 
in government schools, under exclusively privileged 



THE EDUCATIONAL FUNCTIONARIES. 533 

teachers, has proved not merely a failure but a pow- 
erful lever, overturning the governments which es- 
tablished it as a support. In France we see it declared 
that all the teachers of the primary schools, in very 
extensive districts, are socialists, Those who taught, 
qualified, and licensed them must be socialists too; 
and tracing back to the fountain-head the theories of 
communism and socialism, and the fanaticism for im- 
practicable objects which have seized on the public 
mind in Germany and France, it is evident that a few 
dreaming philosophers, in the chairs of the universi- 
ties, may infuse, through this educational machinery, 
a poison into the public mind, which these educating 
governments have no means to counteract. They have 
thrown away the only antidote to false or dangerous 
opinions — freedom of discussion, freedom of tuition, 
freedom of the press. They may dismiss the socialist 
teachers, but they have none to put in their places 
who are not imbued with the same doctrines, and 
educated in the same schools. Free trade in political 
opinion, in the education of the people, in discussion 
through the press, or in public meetings, appears to 
be the safest policy even for autocratic governments. 
The reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the 
great political convulsions in Germany in 1848 and 
1849, and which are but in their beginning now, is, 
that if the German people had the liberal institutions 
and the constitutional forms of government, for which 
they fought so bravely in 1813, and of which they 
were defrauded by their rulers, it is very doubtful if 
they are capable of using them, and working with them 
for the general good of Germany. A central govern- 
ment, with one legislature and one executive power, 
uniting, merely by civil and military functionaries, into 



534 GEEMANY NOT RIPE FOR FREEDOM. 

one nation interests and populations so different and 
distinct, owing to physical circumstances of situation 
and products, that they cannot be joined and placed 
under one law and government with any mutual advan- 
tage or without the sacrifice of one great integral part 
of this new empire to another, would be a monstrous 
regime of tyranny and oppression, whether a democra- 
tic, liberal, or autocratic form were given to it. The 
appendages to the vision, armies, fleets, finances, diplo- 
macy, a metropolis, official residences, will not remedy 
the natural defect — the want of any principle of mu- 
tual advantage to unite the separate parts of Germany 
with feelings of a common interest into a common 
country. The inhabitants, even of those portions of 
Germany which might be united into one national 
body under a national government, want the educa- 
tion of a free people, and the feeling for personal 
independence, the habits of self-government, the en- 
ergy, firmness, and sober good sense of a free people. 
There is but too much truth in the observation of 
Macchiavel, " that it is as difficult to make a servile 
people truly free, as to reduce a free people to 
slavery." 



THE END. 



London : 

Spottiswoodes and Shaw, 

New-street- Square. 



